Innovation is an inherently uncertain process. Success is typically coupled with risk and we can only hope that those with great ideas will persevere. To encourage innovation, society reduces some of the innovation risk through structures like funding systems, regulation, and of course...

The Constitution grants Congress the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts through the intellectual property clause. Scholars and the courts understand “progress” to mean an increase in the creation and dissemination of copyrighted works and patented inventions It is...

In 2023 organizations can apply for a European patent with unitary effect in 25 European Union countries. The system brings many simplifications to obtaining protection, but it also comes with some limitations. The aim of the paper is to explore the possibilities and limitations that a European...

Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In "Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property", Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...

We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents...

This paper assesses the impact of adopting a post-grant review institution in the US patent system by comparing the 'opposition careers' of European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of litigated US patents to those of a control group of EPO patents. We demonstrate several novel methods of...

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...

This paper analyses the causal impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical innovation in a panel of 74 countries. The identification strategy exploits the different timing across countries of two sets of IPR reforms. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted...

Patents should no longer be granted for DNA, but only for new medicinal products, new vaccines and genetic tests which are developed on the basis of DNA. Only in this way, patent law can gain general acceptance in civil and academic society, without losing sight of the interests of the biotech...

This report provides the first edition of a European patent indicator for access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing developed for the European Environment Agency as part of the Streamlining European Biodiversity Indicators (SEBI 2010) process (Report EEA/BSS/08/012). The patent indicator...