About half, probably more, of all patented inventions in the United States are never commercially exploited. Even many of the most commercially significant inventions take decades to come to market. In this article, I contend that the patent system is substantially retarding the...

In this comment to ITC Investigation 337-TA-745 (Certain Wireless Communication Devices, Motorola v. Apple) we, as teachers and scholars of economics, antitrust and intellectual property, remedies, administrative, and international intellectual property law, former Department of Justice lawyers...

Recent studies estimate that the economic impact of U.S. patent litigation may be as large as $80 billion per year and that the overall rate of U.S. patent litigation has been growing rapidly over the past twenty years. And yet, the relationship of the macroeconomy to patent litigation rates has...

Patents and trade secrets are often considered economic substitutes. Under this view, inventors can decide either to maintain an invention as a trade secret or seek a patent and disclose to the public the details of the invention. However, a handful of scholars have recognized that because the...

Professor Colleen Chien recently developed an innovative and important model that relies on a patent's "after-acquired" characteristics to predict the chances that the patent will be involved in litigation. This comment critiques Professor Chien's model by identifying certain weaknesses,...

Numerous scholars have proposed many different explanations for why inventors and innovative companies patent. Few scholars, however, have conducted empirical studies seeking to confirm or deny these theories. Furthermore, there are only a handful of studies examining how entrepreneurs and...

The Patent Act of 1952 provides at 35 U.S.C. § 271(b) that "[w]hoever actively induces infringement of a patent shall be liable as an infringer." This provision codified long-standing precedent deriving from tort law that those who aid and abet direct patent infringement shall be liable for...

This paper rejects the fundamental "private law" premise of patent law remedies that courts should always attempt to restore the status quo ante by making the patentee "whole" in the event of infringement. Instead, the patent system and its associated remedies should be viewed as part of a...

We offer description and analysis of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey, summarizing the responses of 1,332 U.S.-based technology startups in the biotechnology, medical device, IT hardware, software, and Internet sectors. We discover that holding patents is more widespread among technology startups...

A key assumption of today’s standard account of patents is that, absent patent protection, all products would generally be purchased in a competitive market. However, the first regularized patent system appeared during the Renaissance in the Venetian Republic, which was a highly regulated...