By Adam Mossoff
Summary:
Property rights are essential to a free society and a free market. Courts secure these freedoms, especially the freedom to contract, with injunctions to stop trespasses. Courts recently have eliminated injunctions as remedies for violations of patents—property rights in inventions. This has undermined the function of patents as a platform for spurring inventions and for fostering commercial innovations in the free market. Without the ability to stop violations of patent rights, billion-dollar investments in cutting-edge technologies like 5G or cancer cures will not be made. Commercial exchanges are further undermined as deliberate infringement is incentivized. Reliable and effective property rights—patents secured against infringement by injunctions—are the engine that has driven the U.S. innovation economy for over two hundred years.