We are pleased to announce the following events: 

• Rainfall, Human Capital, and Democracy, a paper by Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo was cited in The Economist.  Haber has expanded upon that work in a new working paper, Climate, Technology, and the Evolution of Economic and Political Institutions.
   
• A paper by Richard A. Epstein, F. Scott Kieff, and Richard Spulber, The FTC, IP, and SSOs: Government Hold-up Replacing Private Coordination, was published in the March, 2012 volume of the Journal of Competition Law & Economics.
   
• F. Scott Kieff was consulted for the New York Times article "Trademarks Take on New Importance in Internet Era," published on February 20, 2012 and in print on February 21, 2012.
   
• The European Academy of Sciences and Arts has elected F. Scott Kieff for membership in the Academy for his work in the fields of the social sciences, law, and economics.
   
• Perspectives on Commercializing Innovation, a new book co-edited by F. Scott Kieff, is now available from Cambridge University Press, Amazon.com, and many other booksellers.  See this link for more information and a discount code on orders placed through Cambridge University Press.




• On November 24, 2011, Joseph Straus was awarded the title Ambassador of Science of the Republic of Slovenia by the government of Slovenia.
   
• F. Scott Kieff was interviewed on the John Batchelor Show on November 22, 2011 (skip to 29:30 to hear the interview).
   
• Defining Ideas has published Patently Bad Policy, an essay by F. Scott Kieff on two upcoming Supreme Court patent cases, Hyatt v. Kappos and Mayo v. Prometheus.
   
• On September 5, 2011, F. Scott Kieff was selected by leading experts in the field as a finalist for the 2011 World Technology Award for Law, presented in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, MIT Technology Review, and Science.
   
• On August 5, 2011, Richard A. Epstein, F. Scott Kieff, and Daniel F. Spulber submitted a white paper entitled The FTC's Proposal for Regulating IP through SSOs Would Replace Private Coordination with Government Hold-Up in response to the FTC’s Request for Comments and Announcement of Workshop on Standard-­Setting Issues, Project No. P111204.
   
• A statement by Geoffrey A. Manne and Joshua D. Wright on the recent FTC antitrust investigation of Google was cited in numerous publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the National Journal, and InformationWeek.
   
• A new four-part series of essays by F. Scott Kieff on proposed patent reform in the US has been published by Defining Ideas: The Perils of Patent Reform, Welcome to Patent Purgatory, Patent Reform Goes Haywire, and File First, Invent Later?.   The essays were cited by Representative Dana Rohrabacher in a speech on the House floor on June 22, 2011 and in  the New York Times Dealbook column.
   
• A draft paper co-authored by Stephen Haber, Rainfall, Human Capital, and Democracy, was featured in a Bloomberg article on April 4, 2011.  Mr. Haber was interviewed about the paper on Bloomberg TV's Street Smart.  The paper was also featured in the Wall Street Journal's Week in Ideas for April 9, 2011.
   
• A new paper co-authored by Stephen Haber, Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse, was featured in the Freakonomics blog on April 4, 2011.
   
• F. Scott Kieff and Henry E. Smith were invited to provide testimony for The Evolving IP Marketplace: Aligning Patent Notice and Remedies with Competition, a report published by the FTC on March 7, 2011.  The report cites several of Kieff and Smith's published works.
   
• F. Scott Kieff was interviewed on the John Batchelor Show on February 15, 2011 about the article Why Business Isn't Getting in The Game.  The interview begins at 1:40.
   
• An article by Richard A. Epstein on Patent Injunctions and Repeat Offenders was published by the Financial Times on November 6, 2010.
   
• F. Scott Kieff was part of a panel discussion on Supporting Creativity and its Dissemination, part of Justice Stephen G. Breyer's "The Uneasy Case for Copyright": A 40th Anniversary Symposium, held at The George Washington University Law School on November 4, 2010.
   
• NPR's Morning Edition discussed gene patents with F. Scott Kieff in a story airing November 4, 2010.
   
• Richard A. Epstein and F. Scott Kieff's new paper, Questioning the Frequency and Wisdom of Compulsory Licensing for Pharmaceutical Patents, is now available through the University of Chicago Law & Economics Olin Working Paper Series on SSRN.

• Perspectives on Corporate Governance, a new book edited by F. Scott Kieff and Troy A. Paredes and published by Cambridge University Press, became available in August 2010. The book offers a diverse and forward-looking set of approaches from experts on corporate governance in the US, Japan, and Europe, covering the major areas of corporate governance reform and analyzing the full range of issues and concerns. Written to be both theoretically rigorous and grounded in the real world, the book is well suited for practicing lawyers, managers, lawmakers, and analysts, as well as academics conducting research or teaching a wide range of courses in law schools, business schools, and economics departments.
   
• F. Scott Kieff, Geoffrey A. Manne, Michael E. Sykuta, and Joshua D. Wright submitted their Comment on Intellectual Property, Concentration and the Limits of Antitrust in the Biotech Seed Industry to the Department of Justice Antitrust Division on December 31, 2009, as "Comments Regarding Agriculture and Antitrust Enforcement Issues in Our 21st Century Economy" in response to the DOJ/USDA request for public comments for the agencies' joint workshops on antitrust issues in the agricultural sector. [View comment]
   
• Geoffrey A. Manne has joined the Project on Commercializing Innovation as a contributor.  Manne is a Lecturer in Law at Lewis & Clark Law School and the Executive Director of the International Center for Law & Economics.
   
• Richard A. Epstein and F. Scott Kieff co-authored the amicus curiae brief of Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty in support of the Petitioners in Bilski v. Doll before the Supreme Court of the United States, arguing that broad patentable subject matter is supported by the language of the Patent Act, Supreme Court precedent, and sound public policy.  [View brief]
   
• Effective August 1, 2009, F. Scott Kieff has become a Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC, joining one of the country's leading intellectual property programs, whose alumni have protected a stunning range of inventions including Bell's telephone, Eastman's roll film camera, the Wright Brothers' airplane, DeForest's radio, Edison's phonograph, Fermi and Szilard's nuclear reactor, Kwolek's Kevlar®, Cray's supercomputer, Cohen and Boyer's recombinant DNA, and Chakrabarty's recombinant bacteria.
  
  Kieff joins other notable intellectual property law scholars at GWU, including John Whealan, Martin Adelman, Robert Brauneis, Michael Abramowicz, Jerome Barron, John Duffy, Susan Jones, Orin Kerr, Gregory Maggs, Thomas Morgan, Dawn Nunziato, Sarah Rajec, Joan Schaffner, Roger Schechter, Jonathan Siegel, Daniel Solove, Joseph Straus, Sonia  Suter, Hon. Randall Rader, Hon. Roderick McKelvie, Hon Gerald Mossinghoff, and Hon. Ralph Oman.  As a Professor, Kieff will continue to teach and conduct research in the range of fields relating to the set of legal and business relationships that can be used to bring ideas to market.
• The Financial Times has published an article by PCI Affiliate and Hoover Fellow Richard Epstein titled "The Unraveling of Patents in the US." [View article]
   
• The Wall Street Journal has published an article by PCI Member Stephen Haber on "Latin America's Quiet Revolution." [View article]
   
• PCI Contributor Henry E. Smith spoke at a recent FTC Hearing on the Evolving IP Marketplace.  Professor Smith served on a panel discussing Changes in Injunction Law.  [View transcript Part 1 & Part 2; Video Part 1 & Part 2]
   
• The Financial Times has published an article by PCI Affiliate and Hoover Fellow Richard Epstein titled "Breaking the Patent Logjam." [View article]
   
• The recognition in May 2008 of Project Primary Investigator and Hoover Research Fellow F. Scott Kieff as one of the Nation's "Top 50 under 45" by the magazine IP Law & Business. [View magazine reprint]
   
• The appointment in December 2007 of Project Primary Investigator and Hoover Research Fellow F. Scott Kieff by United States Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez to serve for a three year term on the nine-person Patent Public Advisory Committee of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The Committee was created by Congress in 1999 to advise the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office on matters relating to the policies, goals, performance, budget, and user fees of the patent operation.  
   
• The filing on December 10, 2007, by researchers in the Hoover Project on Commercializing Innovation of an amicus brief in the Supreme Court of the United States in the patent infringement case, Quanta Computer Inc. v. LG Electronics Inc., arguing that under contract law the patent holder had a right to sue a downstream purchaser. [View brief] 

       Project Primary Investigator and Hoover Research Fellow F. Scott Kieff, who is also a Law Professor at Washington University, co-authored the brief with Project Co-Investigator and Washington University Law Professor Troy A. Paredes and University of Pennsylvania Law Professor R. Polk Wagner, in support of the respondent, LG Electronics. Five other professors, who are also experts in the intersection of intellectual property, property rights, and contracts, including Richard A. Epstein, who is Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at Hoover, co-signed the brief. The group’s interest in the case is in “ensuring that patent law develops in a way that best promotes innovation and competition.” 
       In the case, LG Electronics and Intel settled a group of disputes over patents on microchips by giving Intel only a limited license. It made sense for Intel to buy freedom from suit because otherwise Intel might have been guilty of inducing infringement by its customers. Importantly, the license made clear that it applied only to Intel, not to Intel’s customers, and the price Intel paid reflected these modest ambitions.  Quanta, a large commercially sophisticated party, bought chips from Intel with notice of the limited license and an opportunity to negotiate a price that reflected the need to also buy a patent license from LG. When LG demanded that Quanta buy such a license, Quanta argued that the legal doctrine called “first sale” had already given one. The first sale doctrine is a rule that implies patent licenses into certain sales of patented products by patentees.The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to determine whether the first sale doctrine can fairly be stretched to reach cases like this. 
       Kieff, Paredes, and Wagner point out that the longstanding cases of the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit have treated the first sale doctrine as merely a default rule governing sales of products by patentees. They note that the doctrine does not even apply to this case because the underlying transaction in this case between the patentee, LG, and Intel is not a sale but only a limited license. Furthermore, they explain the “first sale doctrine must not be used to directly conflict with written contract terms negotiated between commercially sophisticated parties to clearly create only a limited patent license.” They show why sound public policy requires this result: “Reversing the longstanding case law that respects such licenses would have several related deleterious effects. First, it would give an undue windfall to opportunistic third parties who would be able to assert ‘licenses’ beyond those they knowingly purchased. Second, it would frustrate the reasonable expectations of the countless commercial actors who have settled cases and struck patent license agreements in reliance on the reasonable expectation that the limited terms of their contracts would be enforced. Although a transitional issue, the large number of patents licensed and the length of patent term leave its impact both broad and long. And third, it would make settling future disputes significantly more difficult.”
       The Hoover Project on Commercializing Innovation paid for the costs of printing and filing the brief.

• The publication of the book Political Institutions and Financial Development (Stephen A. Haber, Douglass C. North, and Barry R. Weingast eds., Stanford University Press, 2007).  The essays in this volume employ the insights and techniques of political science, economics, and history to provide a fresh answer to the question of why some countries develop better financial systems than others.
   
• The publication of volume 2 in the ongoing publication, volume by volume, of the 11-volume treatise Securities Regulation (Louis Loss, Joel Seligman, and Troy Paredes, eds., Wolters Kluwer/Aspen 4th ed., 2007).   
   
• The publication of the book Principles of Patent Law (F. Scott Kieff, Pauline Newman, Herbert F. Schwartz, and Henry Smith, eds., Foundation Press, 4th ed., 2008). This treatise and casebook is designed to bring into focus both the theory and practice of patents.