The Internet and IP Rights: Friends or Foes?

Some view the Internet as a lawless realm where everything is free for the taking and neither property nor copyrights have any particular meaning. For these individuals, the very concept of intellectual property is antithetical to their free-for-all perception of the Internet.

For others, the value of the Internet is dramatically magnified by intellectual property rights, from patent-protected network and user equipment to copyrighted software, videos, and exclusive content. In this view, intellectual property bolsters the Internet experience.

To explore whether the Internet and intellectual property are friends or foes, the Center for the Economics of Internet hosted a seminar with Professor Adam Mossoff of the George Mason Law School.

Professor Mossoff is Co-Director of Academic Programs at George Mason University School of Law and Senior Scholar at Mason Law’s Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property. He has written extensively on the topic of patents and other intellectual property rights, with articles appearing in many law journals and other peer-reviewed academic publications. His article “The Sewing Machine War of the 1850s” has become an important part of today's public policy debates concerning patent litigation, patent licensing, and patent pools, and it has been cited in Congress's General Accountability Office Report on Patent Litigation (August 2013) and in briefs filed in recent Supreme Court cases. Mossoff has testified before the Senate, and has presented his research at the PTO, the FTC, the DOJ, and the Smithsonian Institution.