Berichten met de tag JIPLP

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

IPSC 2022 at Stanford: at the first in-person Intellectual Property Scholars Conference after two virtual years (August 11–12, 2022), Mauritz Kop presented his Oxford JIPLP article Intellectual property in quantum computing and market power: a theoretical discussion and empirical analysis, co-authored with Mateo Aboy and Timo Minssen.

When IP stops doing its job

The theory: intellectual property exists to incentivize innovation, but excessive proliferation of exclusive rights over a foundational technology produces anticommons effects — overlapping thickets that raise transaction costs, deter follow-on research and concentrate first-mover market power. Quantum computing, built on decades of publicly funded science, is exactly where that risk bites hardest.

The patent data behind the argument

The empirics: the article analyzes the quantum-computing patent landscape — who files, where portfolios cluster, and what that implies for market structure in a field whose hardware, algorithms and error-correction methods may all carry exclusive rights. Theory says when proliferation harms innovation; the data say where quantum technology stands today.

A transatlantic collaboration, a Stanford homecoming

Kop, Aboy and Minssen connect European and American IP scholarship on quantum computing; for Kop the venue completed a circle, having spent early 2022 as visiting scholar at Stanford Law School. The presentation put the market-power findings before the scholars best placed to attack the methodology — which is what the IPSC works-in-progress format exists to do. And after two virtual editions, the 22nd IPSC's return to a physical Stanford conference room restored the corridor conversations that turn a panel question into a coauthorship.

Standards: the other half of ownership

Beyond patents, quantum interoperability standards will run on disclosure and licensing commitments from the very portfolio holders the article tracks. Whether those commitments are negotiated early, FRAND-style, or after positions harden will shape access to the technology as surely as any patent dispute — and the article's empirical map is groundwork for getting that negotiation right.

Third station of a research arc

From AI's data inputs (IPSC 2020) via waive-or-pledge quantum IP (IPSC 2021) to ownership structure and market power (2022): the sequence tracks a research line moving from machine learning's raw material to quantum computing's ownership structure, each stage workshopped in public before publication. That line later grew into an institutional one — see Stanford University launches the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology. If early patent concentration hardens into durable market power, access to the field's foundational capabilities narrows before the technology matures; making that risk empirically discussable, rather than rhetorical, is the article's lasting contribution.

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Intellectual Property, Academics, ConferenceHenry Quentir12 augustus 2022IPSC, Stanford Law School, quantum computing, intellectual property, market power, JIPLP

Mauritz Kop and Mateo Aboy Present QT and Law Research at Lund Quantum Conference

When Lund University convened The Quantum Law Conference in late April 2022, the legal scholarship on quantum computing was still in its infancy. Organized by Valentin Jeutner under the WASP-HS-funded Quantum Law Project, the gathering—formally titled The Legal Dimensions of Quantum Computing—gave an early home to a question that has only grown more urgent: whether intellectual property law is fit for the quantum age. Mauritz Kop, then a TTLF Fellow at Stanford Law School, and Mateo Aboy, Principal Research Scholar at the University of Cambridge, brought a distinctive answer—one built on data rather than intuition.

Theory meets the patent record

Kop's theoretical contribution warned of IP overprotection: a "rainbow" of overlapping rights that could entrench first movers and concentrate market power in a young field. Rather than rest on the argument, the team tested it. Aboy led a patent-landscape study of the quantum computing subfield, asking whether feared "thicket" and "anticommons" effects were actually appearing. The pairing of a normative framework with empirical patent analysis is what made the Lund presentation unusual—and useful to policymakers who need evidence, not assertion.

A counter-intuitive result

The data pointed the other way. The patent system in quantum computing was not, at that stage, generating innovation-choking overprotection; instead, a growing share of quantum patent information was entering the publicly available disclosure record through lapsed and non-granted filings, forming an expanding information commons. The important caveat was secrecy: trade secrets and state secrets ordinarily do not appear in patent datasets, so quantitative mapping must always be read alongside qualitative analysis. The conclusion was measured—IP law works best in concert with competition law, steering between under- and overprotection.

From a conference room toward the journals

The work is not staying in Lund. The theoretical and market-power strand is forthcoming as a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (Oxford University Press), and the companion patent-landscape study is forthcoming in IIC – International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (Springer), with a transatlantic author team spanning Stanford, Cambridge, and CeBIL at the University of Copenhagen. Together they promise one of the earliest evidence-based treatments of quantum-IP policy. It is a quieter companion to Kop's better-known warning that quantum computing carries risks that rival those of artificial intelligence: here the concern is not catastrophe but market structure—who gets to build on quantum technology, and on what terms. The answer the Lund research offers is calibration, not maximalism: predictability enough to attract investment, openness enough to keep the field competitive.