Justin Johnson reviews a paper by Klaus Schmidt and Monica Schnitzer that urges caution regarding subsidies for free/open source software.

Mickey Davis summarizes a paper by Cecil Quillen and Ogden Webster that finds that when patent statistics for the U.S. patent office are analyzed carefully, it appears the the patent office rejects very few applications.

Alessandro Nuvolari's paper on "Collective Invention" during the British Industrial Revolution (summarized by James Bessen) finds that active sharing of inventions brought large productivity advances to steam engines in the Cornish mines, but only after James Watt's patents expired.

Amir Attaran and Lee Gillespie-White published a controversial paper arguing that patents are not a major barrier to access to AIDS drugs in Africa. Kristina Lybecker carefully reviews their argument and finds it wanting.

"New Challenges to the Patent System" conference sponsored by the
Institute for Innovation Research at the University of Munich and the
EPIP (European Policy for Intellectual Property) Consortium, 24/25 April 2003.