Jonathan M. Barnett – författare

Conventional wisdom holds that robust enforcement of intellectual property (IP) right suppress competition and innovation by shielding incumbents against the entry threats posed by smaller innovators. That assumption has driven mostly successful efforts to weaken US patent protections for over a decade. This book challenges that assumption. In Innovators, Firms, and Markets, Jonathan M. Barnett confronts the reigning policy consensus by analyzing the relationship between IP rights, firm organization, and market structure. Integrating tools and concepts from IP and antitrust law, institutional economics, and political science, real-world understandings of technology markets, and empirical insights from the economic history of the US patent system, Barnett provides a novel framework for IP policy analysis. His cohesive framework explains how robust enforcement of IP rights enables entrepreneurial firms, which are rich in ideas but poor in capital, to secure outside investment and form the cooperative relationships needed to transform a breakthrough innovation into a marketable product. The history of the US patent system and firms' lobbying tendencies show that weakening patent protections removes a critical tool for entrants to challenge incumbents that enjoy difficult-to-match commercialization and financing capacities. Counterintuitively, the book demonstrates that weak IP rights are often the best entry barrier the state can provide to protect entrenched incumbents against disruptive innovators. By challenging common assumptions and offering a powerful integrated framework for understanding how innovation happens and the law's role in that process, Barnett's Innovators, Firms, and Markets provides important insights into how IP law shapes our economy.

In The Big Steal, Jonathan Barnett documents the unusual confluence of ideological commitments and business interests behind the across-the-board dilution of legal protections for inventors and artists under U.S. patent and copyright law. Concurrently with the rise of the digital economy and platform-based markets, the Supreme Court, Congress, and antitrust regulators significantly weakened legal protections against the unauthorized use of technological inventions and creative works. Under the popular slogan that "information wants to be free," significant portions of the scholarly and tech communities advocated and welcomed the erosion of property rights in knowledge markets. This policy shift often relied on incomplete or premature findings that concerning the impact of robust intellectual property rights on innovation markets. Through a rich analysis that draws on law, economics, and political science, and using evidence from a wide range of technology and creative markets, Barnett shows that the depropertization of intellectual assets poses a risk to the U.S. and global innovation ecosystem by shifting economic value toward digital intermediaries and vertically integrated entities and away from the technology and content originators that drive the most robust knowledge economies.