Mauritz Kop Presents Oxford JIPLP Article on Quantum Computing, IP and Market Power at IPSC 2022, Stanford Law School

By AIRecht Editor

Stanford, August 12, 2022. Market power in quantum computing became measurable in 2022 — and Mauritz Kop brought the measurements to the IP academy. At IPSC 2022, hosted in person by Stanford Law School on August 11–12, 2022, Kop presented his Oxford Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice article Intellectual property in quantum computing and market power: a theoretical discussion and empirical analysis, co-authored with Mateo Aboy and Timo Minssen. The article and its findings are discussed in Intellectual Property in Quantum Computing and Market Power (Oxford University Press).

The paper asks a deceptively simple question. Is the intellectual property and antitrust system adequate for quantum computing as it stands, or does the technology call for reforms, clarifications, or alternatives? And if changes are warranted, should they apply to the whole family of quantum technologies — computing, sensing, networks, and quantum-AI hybrids — or only to some, through a differentiated approach? The work was led by Kop together with Professor Timo Minssen (University of Copenhagen) and Professor Mateo Aboy (University of Cambridge), and was published in July 2022 by Oxford University Press in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP).

It did not arrive alone. The same collaboration produced a companion study led by Aboy — Mapping the Patent Landscape of Quantum Technologies: Patenting Trends, Innovation and Policy Implications — published in the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC), the Max Planck journal (Springer Nature, 2022). Together the two papers pair a theoretical argument with a large empirical patent dataset, showing which companies, universities, and countries actually hold the quantum patents.

After two virtual editions, the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference returned to a physical room. The 22nd annual IPSC — co-sponsored by Berkeley Law, Cardozo Law, DePaul Law and Stanford's Program in Law, Science & Technology — convened at Stanford Law School, per the IPSC 2022 conference site. For Kop the venue was also a homecoming: he had spent early 2022 at Stanford as a visiting scholar, as described in Mauritz Kop Visiting Quantum & Law Scholar at Stanford Law School.

Quantum computing, intellectual property and market power — the theme of the IPSC 2022 presentation.

The JIPLP article: theory plus evidence

The article, published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (Oxford University Press, vol. 17, issue 8, 2022, pp. 613–628), pairs a theoretical discussion with an empirical one. The theoretical half asks when intellectual property in quantum computing stops doing its job: IP exists to incentivize innovation, but an excessive proliferation of exclusive rights over a foundational technology can produce anticommons effects — thickets of overlapping rights that raise transaction costs, deter follow-on research and concentrate first-mover market power. The canonical version of record sits with Oxford at academic.oup.com.

The empirical half grounds that concern in data: an analysis of the quantum-computing patent landscape — who is filing, where the portfolios cluster, and what that implies for market structure in a field whose hardware, algorithms and error-correction methods may all carry exclusive rights. The trio's companion patent-landscape study, published in IIC, extends the dataset; its permanent archival copy resolves in the Stanford Law Library collection at purl.stanford.edu/qz422rt8574.

Anticommons, in plain terms

The anticommons is the patent system's failure mode in reverse: where a commons fails because no one can exclude, an anticommons fails because everyone can. When a quantum processor implicates separately owned rights in qubit architectures, control electronics, error-correction schemes and compilation software, each holder can block the assembled product — and the transaction costs of clearing every layer can exceed the value of building at all. That is a theoretical risk in most industries; in quantum computing, where the patent landscape is young, concentrated and still plastic, it is a design question regulators and standards bodies can still answer well — or badly.

Workshopping before the home crowd

An IPSC presentation of a published article is unusual in one sense — most presenters bring drafts — but the quantum-IP research program was, and is, a moving target: the August 2022 session put the market-power findings before the scholars best placed to challenge the theory, the patent-data methodology and the policy inferences, feeding directly into the program's next papers. Questions about quantum technology in an IP room are never only doctrinal: they reach competition policy, standardization, national-security export controls and research funding — exactly the cross-pressures the article maps.

The collaboration behind the article is itself part of the story: Kop (AIRecht; Stanford), Aboy (Cambridge) and Minssen (Copenhagen) connect European and American IP scholarship on quantum computing — a transatlantic axis that matters for a technology whose patent races, talent flows and regulatory responses are global by default.

Standards as the other half of the answer

Patents are only half of the quantum ownership question; standards are the other half. As quantum hardware and software stacks mature, the field will need interoperability standards — and standards bodies run on disclosure and licensing commitments from exactly the portfolio holders the market-power analysis tracks. Whether quantum standardization arrives with FRAND-style commitments negotiated early, or after positions have hardened, will shape who can build on the technology as surely as any single patent dispute. The article's empirical map is the groundwork for getting that negotiation right.

The third IPSC in a row

IPSC 2022 completed a three-year sequence: machine-learning data governance at Stanford's virtual 2020 edition, the waive-or-pledge IP architecture for quantum technology at Cardozo in 2021, and the market-power analysis back at Stanford in 2022. The sequence had a blueprint: the innovation-policy framing laid out in Regulating Transformative Technology in the Quantum Age, which had already argued that IP, standardization and sustainable innovation policy have to be designed together for quantum technology — the JIPLP article supplies the empirical half of that program. Read in order, the three presentations track a research line moving from artificial intelligence's data inputs to quantum computing's ownership structure — each stage workshopped in public before publication, each published piece sturdier for it. The line later grew an institutional dimension as well, with the launch of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology.

What the empirical turn changed

Method was the article's quiet contribution. Before 2022, the quantum-IP debate ran largely on analogy — to software patents, to biotech thickets, to the semiconductor wars — and analogies can be argued past each other indefinitely. Pairing the doctrinal analysis with a patent-landscape dataset changed the register of the conversation: claims about concentration, portfolio clustering and first-mover advantage became checkable, and disagreements became disagreements about data and method rather than about intuition. For a field whose policy window is still open, that shift matters — a standards body, a competition authority or a funding agency can act on a measured landscape in a way it cannot act on a metaphor. It is also what made the work durable: the dataset can be re-run as the landscape grows, and successor studies can falsify or confirm the 2022 picture rather than restart the argument from zero.

Five takeaways for quantum innovation policy

Strategic IP layering can lock up a quantum computer's value. Combining patents, copyright, and trade secrets to maximize a portfolio's value can, in theory, extend protection almost indefinitely. Such overprotection risks raising barriers for quantum start-ups and concentrating market power among a handful of first-moving universities and large corporations.

Yet the real-world field looks different — for now. Counter-intuitively, the empirical data show no such overprotection problem in practice so far: as more quantum patent information enters the public domain, the field is moving toward an expanding quantum-computing information commons. That tempers the theoretical worry — though, as the paper stresses, it is not the whole story.

IP law cannot do everything at once. It cannot simultaneously incentivize creation, prevent market failure, correct winner-takes-all dynamics, eliminate free riding, and curb predatory behavior. To keep competition healthy, antitrust law and IP law need to work in concert rather than in isolation.

Governments and institutions should prepare new strategies now. Options run from conventional to radical: compulsory licensing, raising the patentability bar, narrowly scoped sui generis regimes with shorter durations, limiting trade secrets, adjusting TRIPS, or declaring key quantum technology a public-domain or merit good. Each deserves serious study before market structures harden.

The balance is the point. Quantum IP rights should facilitate rapid technology transfer, information sharing, and national-security objectives and help build a thriving global quantum ecosystem — while safeguarding fundamental rights and reinforcing democratic values. Getting that balance right, rather than defaulting to maximal protection, is the policy task.

Why the market-power question matters

Quantum computing is still early enough to shape. Decisions taken now — in patent offices, competition authorities, and standard-setting bodies — will influence whether the technology develops as a concentrated or a contestable market. The same concern with keeping a dual-use quantum field open runs through Kop's later work on the LSI test for the quantum industrial commons. The IPSC presentation framed these choices as a research agenda rather than a settled answer, inviting scholars to test the propositions against fresh data. For organizations building or licensing quantum technology, the practical lesson is to treat IP strategy and competition exposure as a single question, not two, and to revisit it as the patent landscape keeps shifting.

Quantum computing is precisely the kind of technology where ownership structure becomes destiny. If early patent concentration hardens into durable market power, access to the field's foundational capabilities — for researchers, startups and smaller states — narrows before the technology matures. The JIPLP article's contribution is to make that risk empirically discussable rather than rhetorical: theory says when IP proliferation harms innovation; the data say where the quantum landscape stands. Policy can then act with its eyes open — which is, in the end, what responsible quantum technology governance requires. And because the analysis was workshopped at IPSC in front of the scholars most likely to dispute it, the version policymakers now cite had already survived its hardest audience.

AIRecht advises on the legal and policy questions at the intersection of quantum technology, intellectual property, and competition law. For the underlying analysis, see the published paper in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice.

Last updated: June 9, 2026