A current refrain in patent policy discourse is that “overly-broad” patents of “dubious validity” retard innovation. We briefly review expressions of the thesis to show that they reduce to the allegation that disagreements over enforceable patent scope and/or validity harm innovation....

Designing around patents is prevalent but not often appreciated as a means by which patents promote economic development through competition. We provide a novel detailed empirical study of the extent and timing of designing around patent claims. We study the filing rate of incandescent...

The prevailing historical accounts of the formation of the US aircraft “patent pool” in 1917 assume the US government necessarily intervened to alleviate a patent hold-up among private aircraft manufacturers. We show these accounts to be inconsistent with the historical facts. We show that...

A popular theory is that it may be sufficiently difficult to reach agreement on patent license terms that holdup in development may occur. Early U.S. radio development is widely believed to provide an empirical example of such holdup during 1905-1920, with numerous allegations of an impasse in...