Patents are legal delinquents. A growing body of empirical evidence demonstrates that patents repeatedly fail to fulfill the responsibilities they have been assigned in fostering innovation. But I argue here that in their moments of misbehavior, we can catch a glimpse of the social roles patents...

Recent studies of knowledge production have increasingly recognized the role of codified knowledge in the operation of social organizations. Much of the knowledge resident in organizations exists as tacit knowledge, that is, as knowledge that goes unrecorded. Typically such knowledge is carried...

In this paper I consider the construction of patents as social practices. The goal is to observe patents in action, that is, to catch patents in the act of becoming patents. This method of “following the action” is well established in the scientific arena, where the processes that lead from...

Intellectual property frequently carries with it exclusive rights not only over the primary subject matter of the rights granted, but also over ancillary subject matter that is not within the definition of the primary grant, as for example in the patent doctrine of contributory infringement....

Recent scholarship has begun to assess the role of intellectual property rights in the theory of the Coasean firm. Some of this scholarship has looked at the effects of intellectual property on decisions to "make or buy" inputs to production. Other scholarship has looked at the effects of...

Artificial intelligence, in the form of machine learning systems, is becoming widely deployed across many industries to facilitate the production of new technical or expressive works. Among other applications, these technologies promise rapid product design and creation, often exceeding the...

Legal governance and regulation is becoming increasingly reliant on data collection and algorithmic data processing. In the area of copyright, on-line protection of digitized works is frequently mediated by algorithmic enforcement systems intended to purge illicit content and limit the liability...

Machine learning systems, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), are increasingly being deployed both for the creation of innovative works and the administration of intellectual property (IP) rights associated with those works. At the same time, evidence of racial bias in IP systems is manifest...

Patent law is bogged down in the minutia of claims construction. Claim construction is central to every patent dispute, but it has not provided the hoped-for certainty or notice to competitors. Quite the contrary: disputes about the importance of inventions and the scope of patents have been...

An inescapable feature of regulation is the existence of loopholes: activities that formally comply with the text of regulation, but which in practice avoid the desired outcome of the regulation. Considerable ingenuity may be devoted to exploiting regulatory loopholes. Where technological...