“The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age: The Limits of Analysis” Book Roundtable

The Notre Dame Research Program on Law and Market Behavior is bringing together a diverse group of excellent scholars encompassing different approaches to IP as well as related fields such as property and antitrust to engage in a critical and constructive discussion of the recently published book by Niva Elkin-Koren and Eli Salzberger on “The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age: The Limits of Analysis.” This insightful and broad-ranging work offers an excellent platform for the roundtable’s examination of some of the major challenges presently at the forefront of IP law and economics.

The book explores the economic analysis of intellectual property law, with a special emphasis on the Law and Economics of informational goods in light of the past decade’s technological revolution. In recent years there has been massive growth in Law and Economics literature focusing on intellectual property, on both normative and positive levels of analysis. The economic approach to intellectual property is often described as a monolithic, coherent approach that may differ only as it is applied to a particular case. Yet the growing literature of Law and Economics in intellectual property does not speak in one voice. The economic discourse used in legal scholarship and in policy-making encompasses several strands, each reflecting a fundamentally different approach to the economics of informational works, and each grounded in a different ideology or methodological paradigm. The book delineates the various economic approaches taken and analyzes their tenets. It maps the fundamental concepts and the theoretical foundation of current economic analysis of intellectual property law, in order to fully understand the ramifications of using economic analysis of law in policy making. In so doing, one begins to appreciate the limitations of the current frameworks in confronting the challenges of the information revolution. The book also addresses the fundamental adjustments in the methodology and underlying assumptions that must be employed in order for the economic approach to remain a useful analytical framework for addressing IPR in the information age.

Roundtable Participants:
Michael Abramowicz, George Washington University
Tanya Aplin, Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London
Lionel Bently, Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Dan Burk, UC Irvine School of Law
Robert Burrell, University of Western Australia
Josef Drexl, Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law
Severine Dusollier, University of Namur
Christian Handke, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Frédéric Jenny, ESSEC Business School, Paris
Dan Kelly, University of Notre Dame
Mark McKenna, University of Notre Dame
Christopher Sprigman, University of Virginia
Alain Strowel, Covington & Burling LLP
Avishalom Tor, University of Notre Dame
Stephen Yelderman, University of Notre Dame

The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age: The Limits of Analysis Authors:
Niva Elkin-Koren
Eli Salzberger