Prof. Robert P. Merges, University of California at Berkeley School of Law July 22, 2013 Talk of trolls and patent reform is in the air.  Many speak of a crisis, a sense that the center of the patent system is not holding.  Reforms span a wide spectrum: While the Supreme Court reins in what it [...]

Prof. Robert P. Merges, University of California at Berkeley School of Law June 8, 2012 The mobile phone patent wars, which have been heating up over the past year and more, serve up a dizzying array of complex issues.  This begins with the technology itself – a marvelous marriage between miniature hardware, sophisticated communications, and amazing [...]

Prof. Robert P. Merges, University of California at Berkeley School of Law May 17, 2012 The secondary patent market is red hot these days.1   The focus, almost exclusively, is on the purchase and sale of large-scale patent portfolios.  Some of these transactions stem from technologies that are no longer considered strategically crucial to the selling [...]

Professor Robert P. Merges University of California at Berkeley School of Law January 4, 2012   1.  Introduction Now that In re Bilski has been decided, there is an enormous amount of speculation about the impact on patent applicants, litigants, and other participants in the patent system.  Most of the commentary is concerned with the [...]

Professor Robert P. Merges University of California at Berkeley School of Law November 15, 2011 Something big is afoot in the world of patent-related transactions.  It is easy to tick off a growing list of head-turning deals in which household-name companies have bought and sold patent portfolios in recent years: Nortel, Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, [...]

Prof. Robert P. Merges, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC-Berkeley Aug. 6, 2009 In the IP world, and in law generally, commonly accepted non-legal social norms have been the focus of intense interest in recent years.  Much of the attention has focused on the interaction between norms and formal law.  Some scholars have been interested [...]

Prof. Robert P. Merges, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC-Berkeley May 26, 2009 The current literature on IP rights is full of contrasts.  On one side are the champions of the digital revolution, who argue that traditional IP rights are generally unsuited to the new world of digital content.  They claim that the inherited structure [...]

Prof. Robert P. Merges, Boalt Hall School of Law, Berkeley March 25, 2009 I take the participatory, democratic aspects of culture very seriously.  I have devoted some effort to thinking through how the inherited legal structure of IP rights can be adapted and modified to encourage the many new avenues of participatory creativity – the [...]