The Role of Courts in Technology Policy
当既有企业起诉开发威胁其业务的技术的新进入者，且版权和专利法模糊时，法院裁决的福利后果如何？本文通过形式模型表明，法院应判给资源受限方（通常是新进入者），即使相反裁决在法院是最终政策制定者时更优。
When established firms sue a newcomer who has developed a technology that threatens their business, and the copyright and patent laws are unclear as to whether the challenged use is illegal, what are the welfare consequences of various judicial rulings? This question is usually answered by conceptualizing the court’s decision as the final choice of policy. But that is misleading because the court’s decision merely forms the baseline from which Congress, lobbied by interest groups, enacts the final policy. I present a formal model that captures this dynamic context. The model shows that the court’s optimal decision is to rule for the resource-constrained party, which is often the newcomer, even when the opposite ruling would be preferable if the court were the final policy maker. The model’s logic is illustrated by case studies of Supreme Court decisions on copyright law.