Advanced industrialized countries in earlier stages of their development benefited from faster economic growth and greater social welfare by explicitly adopting weaker IP protection than is demanded of developing countries today. Even in the United States, there is growing concern that so-called hold-up patents and me-too patents – and the sheer thicket of patents, in which any innovation is likely to become entangled in someone else’s IP claims – are diverting scarce research resources away from their most productive uses.