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...

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 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...

Intellectual property is traditionally split into three main segments that of copyright, patents and trademarks. In theory, each category of intellectual creations should belong in only one segment of the system and only to the extent authorized by relevant statutory provisions or judicial...

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 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...

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...

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...

Concerns have been raised that the upsurge of 3D printing technology would disrupt the patent system. The central question the present paper aims to address is whether and to what extent the emergence of 3D printing technology indeed urges us to rethink patent law. The paper splits up this...