As one who travels a lot in competition policy circles, I’m familiar with many of the criticisms of the modern intellectual property system. So I’ve always enjoyed and benefited from my colleague Adam Mossoff and his critiques of those criticisms. He has a piece up at Forbes.com that is a nice summary of his approach to these questions and an overview of his responses. As I take his point, and his extensive historical research that supports it, is essentially that although there are a lot of theoretical criticisms of the patent system, there is little actual empirical evidence to back it up. Well worth a read.