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...

The first sale or patent exhaustion doctrine reflects the limited nature of patents. In Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., the Supreme Court reaffirmed the principle that the authorized sale of a patented item exhausts the patent as to that item. However, in the context of...

This paper examines the duty of disclosure in patent law and discusses the potential insufficiency of disclosing a computer program’s functionality in patent applications for certain categories of software – applications working on closed platforms. In Canada, software patents are generally...

The Supreme Court in Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. reaffirmed the principle that the authorized sale of a patented item exhausts patent protection as to that particular item. However, it is unclear how the patent exhaustion/first sale doctrine should apply in the context of...

This paper, commissioned for the now defunct UK Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, looks at some aspects of UK patent law and asks whether some of the activities it rewards deserve the protection they get. The argument is that patent law should more precisely match and reward...

Teamwork in research has been on the rise and so has the size of R&D teams. This paper offers an ex-planation for increasing team size that we call the "racing against time" hypothesis: With innovation races more competitive globally, R&D firms need to finish research projects as quickly as...

At least since Arrow (1962), economists have believed that strong property rights are necessary for firms to invest in innovation. This belief was a key principle underlying the Bayh-Dole Act, which gave universities the right to own and license federally funded inventions, because the...

Teamwork in research has been on the rise and so has the size of R&D teams. This paper offers an explanation for increasing team size that we call the "racing against time" hypothesis: With innovation races more competitive globally, R&D firms need to finish research projects as quickly as...

This paper utilizes a data set of over 208,000 U.S. patents applied for between 1975 and 2010 to study development of strategic patenting over time and across industries. With received citations as a measure of patent social value, we use data envelopment analysis to estimate firm-level relative...