IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/econwp/qt3c04n348.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Damages and Injunctions in Protecting Proprietary Research Tools

Author

Listed:
  • Schankerman, Mark
  • Scotchmer, Suzanne

Abstract

We investigate how liability rules and property rules affect the incentives to invest in research tools. We argue that it is hard to deter infringement under any of the enforcement regimes available. However, counterintuitively, a credible threat of infringement can actually be beneficial to the patentholder. We compare the two doctrines of damages under the liability rule, namely, lost profit (lost royalty) and unjust enrichment, and argue that unjust enrichment protects the patentholder better than lost royalty. Both can be superior to a property rule (the right to enjoin infringement), depending on how much delay is permitted before infringement is enjoined. We also show that, for patents on end-user products, the ranking of liability doctrines is reversed: unjust enrichment is inferior to lost profits.

Suggested Citation

  • Schankerman, Mark & Scotchmer, Suzanne, 2000. "Damages and Injunctions in Protecting Proprietary Research Tools," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt3c04n348, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:econwp:qt3c04n348
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/3c04n348.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    intellectual property; damages; injunctions; research tools;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K0 - Law and Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:econwp:qt3c04n348. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ibbrkus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.