Intro to IPR

How might the strength or weakness of protection affect the incentive-based arguments for and against IP? To better understand this, we will look briefly at the history of patent protection in the United States, and explore two critical concepts in depth: patent holdup and patent holdout.

In part one, we explored the core philosophy behind IPR and its economic justifications. In this second part, we will explore the metaphysics of IP, what it means to ‘protect’ it, and how neg teams can craft a stronger topicality limit than the mainstream topic literature might allow.

In this introduction, we will discuss the areas covered by the topic with a focus on establishing a basic economic framework to evaluate IP policy going forward.