@article{44311,
      recid = {44311},
      author = {Stephen H. Haber, and Jonathan M. Barnett,},
      title = {The Battle over Patents : History and Politics of  Innovation.},
      pages = {393 pages.},
      abstract = {Do patents facilitate or frustrate innovation? Lawyers,  economists, and politicians who have staked out strong  positions in this debate often attempt to validate their  claims by invoking the historical record—but they typically  get the history wrong. The purpose of this book is to get  the history right by showing that patent systems are the  product of contending interests at different points in  production chains battling over economic surplus. The  larger the potential surplus, the more extreme are the  efforts of contending parties, now and in the past, to  search out, generate, and exploit any and all sources of  friction. Patent systems, as human creations, are therefore  necessarily ridden with imperfections; nirvana is not on  the menu. The most interesting intellectual issue is not  how patent systems are imperfect, but why historically  US-style patent systems have come to dominate all other  methods of encouraging inventive activity. The answer  offered by the essays in this volume is that they create a  temporary property right that can be traded in a market,  thereby facilitating a productive division of labor and  making it possible for firms to transfer technological  knowledge to one another by overcoming the free-rider  problem. Precisely because the value of a patent does not  inhere in the award itself but rather in the market value  of the resulting property right, patent systems foster a  decentralized ecology of inventors and firms that  ceaselessly extends the frontiers of what is economically  possible.},
      url = {http://tind.wipo.int/record/44311},
}