Patent Failure: A Tragedy of Property

This essay reviews and extends the arguments that James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer present in Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk. Patent Failure raises the bar for contributions to the ongoing debates over both the need for patent reform and the type of patent reform that is needed. Based on an innovative and elegant empirical analysis, Bessen and Meurer defend the counterintuitive position that, outside of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, the contemporary patent regime functions as a tax on innovation. In other words, taking a world without any patent protection at all as the baseline, they argue that patents decrease the welfare of the very innovating firms that are today seeking and obtaining patents. To explain this phenomenon, they point to the poor notice of the existence and scope of patent rights that the contemporary patent regime provides to the public. Poor notice, in turn, means that innovating firms bear an unavoidable risk of infringing other innovating firms' patents and bearing the costs of litigation. Bessen and Meurer simply argue that the average benefit that an innovating firm receives from owning its own patents is smaller than the average cost it incurs to fend of allegations of patent infringement. After summarizing and critiquing the book's principal arguments, this Essay extends Bessen and Meurer's analysis by exploring the import of their findings for legal scholarship on property failures. Although they do not themselves articulate this point, Bessen and Meurer enrich the literature on property failures by positing a new model for property failure: a tragedy of property. A tragedy of property is the true mirror image of the tragedy of the commons: it is a rush to ruin that is caused, rather than remedied, by property. An innovating firm receives a private welfare benefit from obtaining and enforcing each additional patent. However, each innovator's self-interested decision to increase his or her own "herd" of patents decreases the welfare of innovators as a group because the inter-innovator externalities of patents outweigh the benefits that patent owners internalize. A tragedy of the commons results from the inefficient, externality-generating overuse of a rival, scarce resource. A tragedy of property results from the inefficient, externality-generating overuse of the institution of property itself.