The Strategic Use of Fuzziness in Patent Specifications

Innovators seek to protect their intellectual assets by patenting them, at the same time trying to avoid any disclosure of critical knowledge. Given that a patent specification has to include a clear description of the patented matter so that anybody “skilled in the art” is enabled to reproduce the invention, the non-disclosure intention seems contradictory to patent law. This paper provides a model identifying the incentives for firms to deliberately obscure their inventive knowledge in a patent specification