Patents are a key element of our knowledge based economy. They are meant to operate as an instrument for fostering innovation by generating incentives through the grant of temporary exclusive rights. The present paper starts by describing some major trends in patent law and practice and throws...

There is increasing concern that overlapping patents in the field of genetics will create a costly and legally complex situation known as a patent thicket, which, along with the associated issues of accumulating royalty payments, can act as a disincentive for innovation. One potential means of...

The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

The Constitution gives Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The patent system embodies this power, but does it fulfill its essential purpose? This Note explores the scope of the exclusive rights of patents, arguing that in many circumstances the exclusive...

This Article explores the practical consequences of an important shift that has recently taken place in patent theory. Although it was long agreed that the purpose of granting patents is to reward invention, today many scholars instead attempt to justify the patent system based on its role in...

Patents constitute our foremost policy tool for encouraging innovation. However, because each new technology provides an important input to subsequent innovation, the exclusive rights conferred by a patent may also impose significant costs upon follow-on innovators. Optimal patent policy should...

This article presents a new theoretical framework for evaluating the proportion of a product's surplus attributable to intellectual property (IP, such as patents or trademarks). It is used to explain the empirically observed differences between the use patterns of IP in industries based on...

This paper investigates the choice of an intellectual protection regime for a process innovation. We set up a multi-stage model in which choosing between patent and trade secrecy is affected by three parameters: the patent strength defined as the probability that the right is upheld by the...