Summer 1996 NBER Workshop on "Intellectual Property: Insights from Two Cases"

On Tuesday, July 23, 1996, a session on "Intellectual Property: Insights from Two Cases" was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was the second of a series of initiatives on this topic under the aegis of the NBER. The structure of this session will be somewhat different from the previous summer's workshop, which primarily featured academic papers.

This session was organized around two real-life cases, Cistron Biotechnology v. Immunex Corporation and Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, with both practitioner and academic discussants. These cases allowed us to explore not only the nature of patent, copyright and trade secret protection in the biotechnology and software industries, but also the ways in which these forms of protection are shaping the behavior of large and small corporations and universities.

Readings on each case were distributed in advance to the workshop participants. The session was organized by Josh Lerner of Harvard University and Suzanne Scotchmer of the University of California-Berkeley.