Corporate & Securities Law

TOTM/ Patently-O Blog Symposium: Michael Carrier’s Innovation for the 21st Century

On March 30th and 31st, TOTM will hold its first blog symposium.  The topic will be Michael Carrier’s (Rutgers) forthcoming book: Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law (from Oxford University Press).

We’ve invited a number of leading scholars from the fields of antitrust and intellectual property to comment on Professor Carrier’s book.  Here is a description of the book’s contents from Professor Carrier:

Innovation for the 21st Century offers ten proposals, from pharmaceuticals to peer-to-peer software, that will help foster innovation.  Of the ten proposals, three target antitrust topics that may be of interest to your readers: (1) settlement agreements between brand and generic firms in the pharmaceutical industry, (2) an innovation-markets framework to be applied to pharmaceutical mergers in which the “products” are in preclinical or clinical trials, and (3) standard-setting.  The book also offers a primer on patent, copyright, and antitrust law, as well as the IP-antitrust intersection.

On Monday, March 30th, we will focus primarily on the antitrust aspects of Carrier’s proposals.  The four discussants will be: Dan Crane (University of Chicago/ Cardozo), Geoff Manne (TOTM/LECG), Phil Weiser (Colorado), and yours truly.

On Tuesday, March 31st, we will focus primarily on the intellectual property aspects of Carrier’s work.  The three discussants will be:  Dennis Crouch (Patently-O/Missouri), Brett Frischmann (Cornell/ Loyola), and F. Scott Kieff (Wash U./ Hoover/ and on his way to GW).

On Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning (depending on the length of the posts), Carrier will post a response.  In the meantime, I do hope that the participants, Professor Carrier, our normal cadre of excellent commenters will mix it up in the comments throughout (mix it up, of course, in the civil and respectful tone that we usually see here).

I want to thank this great lineup of antitrust and IP scholars for agreeing to participate.  It should be a lot of fun.

The symposium will be a joint production, thanks to Dennis Crouch, with posts going up both here and Patently-O.

More details to be announced soon. For now, buy the book!  See you on March 30th and 31st.

Full post as published by Truth on the Market on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).