Adam Mossoff

Patents secure the fruits of productive labors of the innovators who create the new products and services that drive economic growth, create jobs, and ultimately contribute to a flourishing society.

Ayn Rand’s genius was to recognize that man’s mind is his basic means of survival, that production is the application of reason to the problem of survival, and thus that all property is logically intellectual property at root.

Trump has been a champion of protecting U.S. innovators from the theft of their inventions by foreign countries, such as China. However, his executive order takes the U.S. in the wrong direction. It would import not just foreign price controls, but also weaker foreign patent systems.

The Trump Administration should not permit the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to eviscerate the key constitutional and economic function of copyright law by forcing U.S. intellectual property owners to give away their copyrighted works for free to China and the rest of the world.

It is time for Congress to restore balance to a patent system that has historically secured the fruits of inventive labors with reliable and effective property rights in inventions and discoveries.

An open letter sent to Congress about the Venue Act, which is another attempt to deny the rights of inventors.

In plain English, here’s the deal that Tesla is offering to manufacturers and users of its electrical car technology: in exchange for using Tesla’s patents, the users of Tesla’s patents cannot file patent infringement lawsuits against Tesla if Tesla uses their other patents.

With the future of innovation at stake, it is not crazy to ask that before we make radical, systemic changes to the patent system that we have validly established empirical evidence that such revisions are in fact necessary or at least would do more good than harm.

There certainly are bad actors, deceptive demand letters, and frivolous litigation in the patent system. The important question, though, is whether there is a systemic problem requiring further systemic revisions to the patent system.

Unfortunately, the complaints today about today’s patent litigation crisis arise more from unchecked intuitions about what feels like a bad situation, from unrealistic assumptions about how much certainty we can achieve in the patent system, and from emotionally-compelling anecdotes about innovators running into trouble with patents.

This basic economic fact—dynamic development of innovative distribution mechanisms require substantial investment in both people and resources—is what makes commercialization an essential feature of both copyright policy and law (and of all intellectual property doctrines).

IP rights have developed in the same way as property rights in land with both legislatures and courts creating, repealing, and extending doctrines in an important institutional and doctrinal evolution of these property rights securing technological innovation and creative works.

This oft-made contrast by libertarians between so-called “common law property in land” versus “statutory IP” is a myth that has no basis in the reality of how common law property rights in land evolved in England and then in the United States of America.