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.

中文翻译：

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法院在技术政策中的作用

当老牌公司起诉新来者，该新来者已经开发出威胁其业务的技术，并且版权和专利法尚不清楚受质疑的使用是否违法时，各种司法裁决的福利后果如何？通常通过将法院的判决概念化为政策的最终选择来回答这个问题。但这具有误导性，因为法院的裁决仅构成了由利益集团游说的国会制定最终政策的基准。我提出了一个捕获此动态上下文的正式模型。该模型表明，法院的最佳决策是裁定资源有限的当事方，这通常是新来者，即使相反的裁决如果法院是最终的决策者更可取。