Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
The system of visiting assistant professorships (VAPs) in American law schools has always been somewhat mysterious to me.
If you are in the same situation and intend to apply to teach in law schools, this post links to a list of VAPs and law school fellowships across the country, and it promises to explore the topic further in the future.
In my law and economics seminar tonight, I discussed property, which is the second topic I cover under private law.
In the section on intellectual property, I briefly discuss trade secrecy as an alternative to patenting. The obvious advantage of trade secrecy is that unlike a patent, a trade secret can last much longer than 20 years. My slide on the topic says that:
“If a firm can keep a secret, there is no limit to how long it can appropriate the rents from its inventive activity (e.g., McDonald’s Big Mac sauce, Coke’s recipe, etc.) Moreover, trade secrecy law prevents the wrongful appropriation (e.g., breach of contract) of a trade secret. Independent discovery is allowed (e.g., Pepsi’s recipe, which is close to Coke’s), as are reverse engineering and taking advantage of accidental disclosure.”
As luck would have it, this week’s episode of This American Life reports on the (re)discovery of what may well be the original Coke recipe.
Unless you have been off the grid all of last week, you are probably aware that AOL has purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million in cash and stock.
Nate Silver, of fivethirtyeight.com fame, provides his usual excellent analysis in a post on his New York Times blog discussing both the deal and the economics of blogging.