Government Grants Provided More Incentive to Innovate than Patents

James Bessen is the co-author of the forthcoming book "Do Patents Work?" and gave a highly enlightening speech at Duke which is available on iTunes (see below). His empirical studies of the patent system of the United States provides important insight into the ever-growing field of intellectual property.

The talk is filled with fascinating statistics like the fact that in 1991 the total value of US patents was $4 billion. In the same year, the US government provided R&D subsidies to US firms of $26 billion. If patents are supposed to serve as incentive to innovate, yet the government had to provide nearly 8 times as much incentive, there are serious issues with this form of property. Bessen blames, among other things, fuzzy boundaries and the tax of litigation (which has exploded recently).

[Link to iTunes]