[cyphereal]

The article is very hand-wavy about the core rent seeking argument. There is much discussion about factors such as productivity improvements concentration of market power and mergers and acquisitions.

From TFA: "says Blankenburg, “the data show very clearly that the means used to obtain these profits cannot be reduced to the use of productive technologies.” Other mechanisms, such as lobbying or mergers and acquisitions, the authors find, have played a significant role in enhancing the market power of dominant companies. “You can show quite clearly how surplus profits increase with mergers and acquisitions, or how changes in regulation that favor control over intellectual property rights for large corporations have a pretty-instant impact on the profit performance of those companies,"

That's the sum total of the rent seeking argument. There is nothing in there demonstrating use of IP to extract rent (which, arguably isn't even rent seeking behaviour, but for the sake of argument may be granted here). My intuition is that profit extraction due to IP for the very large companies is most obvious in pharmaceuticals, but that's just my guess?

There are a few interesting points in this article, but it's weakly written.