Liability Rules in Patent Law: A Legal and Economic Analysis

The primary purpose of a patent law system should be to enhance economic efficiency, in particular by providing incentives for making inventions. The conventional wisdom is that patents should therefore be strictly exclusive rights. Moreover, in practice patent owners are almost never forced to give up their right to exclude others and receive only a certain amount of remuneration with, for instance, compulsory licensing. Other economically interesting patent-law objectives, however, includ...