Stephan is a patent autorney and Libertarian scholar, from whom I've learned a lot over the years. Although he is not an economist, he has made a very important contribution to economics by providing the best alaboration of the case against intellectual property.

I highly recommend his paper "Against Intellectual Property", which I taught in my ECO12 class. Jed Grant is CEO of KYC3.com and founder of OpenCryptoAlliance, which is attempting to help fight patent trolls in the bitcoin space.  

We discussed the nature of patents and the threat they pose for bitcoiners and bitcoin companies, and how they attempt to fix it.   Links mentioned in the seminar:  

• The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright
• Legal Scholars: Thumbs Down on Patent and Copyright
• Tabarrok: Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin
• AskProfWolff: Patents and Copyrights: A Socialist Approach
• What would a blockchain patent war look like?
• A Patent War is Coming...
• Alibaba on Track to Be the Largest Blockchain Patent Holder by End of 2020: Study
• The Current State of Blockchain Patents
• The Fight against Intellectual Property
• Boldrin and Levine: The Case Against Patents
• Economic and Game Theory Against Intellectual Monopoly
• Lotnet - Prevent unwanted litigation while preserving the use of your patents
• Do Business Without Intellectual Property
• Defensive Patent Publishing