There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention … framework set by patent laws with respect to the patentability of business methods, contrasting the situation in lege in Europe … Europe. In the empirical part of the paper, 1,901 European patent applications relating to business methods are identified …

By using the PatVal-EU dataset we find that the most important determinant of patent licensing is firm size. Patent …. -- Licensing ; patent scope ; complementary assets ; firm size ; markets for technology …

for a target increases with the patent stock, the relatedness, the value and the blocking potential of the target …'s patents, especially if blocking patents are in technology fields related to the acquiring firm's patent portfolio. Our results …

. Using a binary size measure, we find strong support for the traditional view that firms patent their most important … framework. -- filing fees ; imitation ; innovation ; probabilistic patent rights ; R&D ; simultaneous innovation ; trade secrets …

between the propensity to jointly own a patent and proximity in the product market; b) joint patents are associated with less …

art which is relevant to judge the novelty of patent applications at the patent office and that corporate science has the … power to block patent applications. This paper analyses for the first time whether the presumed mechanism behind corporate … publications by corporations challenge the novelty of patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) significantly more …

forward citations patents can receive at the European Patent Office. While a patent can be cited as non-infringing state of … the art, it can also be cited because it threatens the novelty of patent applications ("blocking citations"). Empirical …. This finding adds to the patent value literature by showing that different types of patent citations carry different …