In the last decades, innovation activity has been defined by an increasing complexity and a faster pace of the underlying technological change. Accordingly, several studies have shown that competitive systems of innovation benefit from being able to build upon a wide but integrated spectrum of...

This paper presents an easy-to-use measure of patent scope that is grounded both in patent law and in the practices of patent attorneys. We validate our measure by showing both that patent attorneys' subjective assessments of scope agree with our estimates, and that the behaviour of patenters is...

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...

Recent months have seen intensified global calls for an intellectual property waiver of COVID-19 related vaccines, treatments and related products. Where one side of the debate elevates Intellectual Property Rights as on obstacle to affordable and expeditious global access to vaccines and...

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...

Release of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Office Action Research Dataset for Patents marks the first time that comprehensive data on examiner-issued rejections are readily available to the research community. An “Office action” is a written notification to the...

Patent scope is one of the important aspects in the debates over “patent quality.” The purported decrease in patent quality over the past decade or two has supposedly led to granting patents of increased breadth (or “overly broad” patents), decreased clarity, and questionable validity....

This Article explores the claiming systems of patent and copyright law. It first develops a two-dimensional taxonomy: claiming can be either peripheral or central and either by characteristic or by exemplar. Patent law has principally adopted a system of peripheral claiming, requiring patentees...

Does U.S. patent law increase the competitiveness of U.S. firms in global markets? This Article argues that, contrary to the beliefs of many U.S. lawmakers, U.S. patent law currently undermines the ability of U.S. firms to compete in global markets because strong U.S. patent rights actually...

This essay, written for the National Association of Environmental Law Societies' (NAELS) annual meeting, explains how patent law operates generally with an emphasis on how it may impact the environment in particular. In so doing, the essay addresses from a patent perspective some representative...