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.
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