Novelty is a basic requirement of patent law. An inventor cannot obtain a patent if the invention exists in the “prior art,” a term that generally refers to knowledge and technology already in the public domain. Interestingly, an earlier-filed patent document qualifies as prior art as of its...

Academic inventions are key drivers of technical progress in modern economies, and exclusive licensing has become the dominant means of transfer to the private sector. However, the strong licensee incentives generated by exclusive academic licensing are generally assumed to come at the expense...

The US case Akamai Technologies Inc v Limelight Networks Inc brought the patent world's attention to the issue of if and how a patentee may enforce a method claim against a party who performs some of the steps in a patented method but leaves other steps to be performed by a third party. The case...

In the land of ‘Jugaad’, where everyone is able to find a frugal fix toany problem, innovation is still dismal. Innovation in India is dismal not because of the lack of grey matter, but because India is systemically failing its inventors – firstly, through an education system that focuses...

The patent system gives the courts discretion to tailor patentability standards flexibly across technologies to provide optimal incentives for innovation. For chemical inventions, the courts deem them unpatentable if the chemical lacks a practical, non-research-based use at the time patent...

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on Ramp;D, patenting and market value in the computer software industry. We focus on two key aspects:...

This paper uses a large language model to develop an ex-ante measure of the commercial potential of scientific findings. In addition to validating the measure against the typical holdout sample, we validate it externally against 1.) the progression of scientific findings through a major...

Judge Bryson recently asserted in Association for Molecular Pathology v. US Patent and Trademark Office (dissenting-in-part) that human gene patents "present a significant obstacle to the next generation of innovation in genetic medicine — multiplex tests and whole-genome sequencing." His...

In their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

A 2005 Science article by Jensen and Murray is widely cited for the proposition that 20% of human genes are patented, and has led to a pervasive assumption that thousands of human genes cannot be used, studied or even 'looked at' by researchers and healthcare providers without infringing a gene...