The externalization of domestic regulation: Intellectual property rights reform in a global era

This dissertation seeks to explain different patterns of IPR reform across the core "new information industries": software, biotechnology, and semiconductors. These industries each engage a different type of IPR--copyrights, patents, and mask works, respectively--and each exhibits a different type of externalization strategy. Software technology has been granted copyright protection and limited patent protection, while the externalization strategy has varied over time; biotechnology has been accommodated through expanded patent rights that have been cooperatively externalized through multilateral channels; and semiconductor technology has been granted a sui generis IPR accompanied by coercive externalization conditions.;The purpose of this research is to explain why U.S. IPR reform in the new information technologies exhibits such different strategies of externalization. The analysis relies on a comparative case study methodology, using the classic method of comparing similar cases with divergent outcomes. The cases are fundamentally similar in that they all involve "leading edge" technology-intensive industries that are highly international, intensely competitive, and rapidly changing. In addition, all of them involve technologies that confound the two main classes of intellectual property, patents and copyrights. Despite these fundamental similarities, however, each case exhibits a different process of domestic accommodation and a different style of externalizing domestic regulatory reform. Why have the strategies varied? Why has regulatory change been consistent with the international IPR regimes in some cases but not in others?;The central research finding is that varying types of international competition can lead to different degrees of trade leverage, which in turn shapes the politics of adversarial regulation in reasonably predictable ways. The case comparisons indicate that the different implications of IPR reform for competitiveness in each sector confer a different degree of potential trade leverage: the semiconductor industry has a high degree, the software industry a moderate yet increasing degree, and the biotechnology industries a relatively low degree. As a set, the cases demonstrate that higher levels of trade leverage correspond with coercive and bilateral externalization strategies, while lower levels of trade leverage correspond with cooperative and multilateral externalization strategies.