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The Perfect Spill: Solutions for Averting the Next Deepwater Horizon By Robert Costanza, David Batker, John Day, Rusty Feagin, M. Luisa Martinez, Joe Roman National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) f we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction-if we don't factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs-we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future." -President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010 he continuing oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon is causing enormous economic and ecological damage. Estimates of the size and duration continue to escalate, but it is now the largest in U.S. history and clearly among the largest oil spills on record.1 s efforts to plug the leak and clean up the damages continue, it is not too soon to begin to draw lessons from this disaster. We need to learn from this experience so we can prevent future oil spills, reevaluate society's current trajectory, and set a better course. ne major lesson is that our natural capital assets and other public goods are far too valuable to continue to put them at such high risk from private interests. We need better (not necessarily more) regulation and strong incentives to protect these assets against actions that put them at risk. While the Obama administration's demand for a trust fund to compensate injured parties is appropriate, it arrived only after the fact. Common asset trusts and new financial instruments like assurance bonds would be better able to shift risk incentives and prevent disasters like the Deepwater Horizon. The Costs: Damages to Natural Capital Assets he spill has directly and indirectly affected at least 20 categories of valuable ecosystem services in and around the Gulf of Mexico. The $2.5 billion per year Louisiana commercial fishery has been almost completely shut down. As the oil extends to popular Gulf Coast beaches, the loss of tourism

Asset Specificity and Transaction Structures: A Case Study of @Home Corporation Spring, 2010 15 Harv. Negotiation L. Rev. 77 Author Brian J.M. Quinn 1 Excerpt I. Introduction   While broadband Internet access seems commonplace today, during the mid-1990s the technology required to support the development of high-speed residential Internet access was still nascent. Before service providers could introduce such technology nationwide, proponents of a broadband vision had to overcome a series of technical and economic challenges, not the least of which involved coordinating large investments in dedicated infrastructure capable of supporting such a network. This article is a case study of how the largest cable companies in the United States used contract and transaction structures to overcome these challenges and build the first nationwide high-speed network.

My company, Intellectual Ventures, is misunderstood. We have been reviled as a patent troll-a renegade outfit that buys up patents and then uses them to hold up innocent companies. What we're really trying to do is create a capital market for inventions akin to the venture capital market that supports start-ups and the private equity market that revitalizes inefficient companies. Our goal is to make applied research a profitable activity that attracts vastly more private investment than it does today so that the number of inventions generated soars. "That's preposterous," some might say. "Inventing can't be a business in its own right. It's too risky, and inventions are too intangible to generate sufficient profits by themselves. Inventing and inventions can't be separated from the companies that turn the ideas into actual products. And the notion of creating a liquid market for inventions is absurd." I couldn't disagree more. In the 1970s, people said the same thing about another type of intangible intellectual property: software. Back then, everyone in the computer industry believed that software was valuable only because it helped to sell mainframes or minicomputers and that you could never sell software by itself. As a result, software engineers worked for computer manufacturers or for companies that used computers. Very few independent software vendors existed, and those that did were barely profitable. As a business, software was hopeless. Everyone said so. Everyone was wrong, of course. Over the next three decades, software became one of the most profitable businesses in history. I know because, as a manager and ultimately the chief technology officer at Microsoft, I had a ringside seat to this amazing success story. Software owes its ascent largely to two crucial developments. First, software vendors gradually persuaded software users-through both education and lawsuits-to respect intellectual property rights and pay for somethi