“Reverse” or “exclusion” payments to settle pharmaceutical patent lawsuits are facilitated because the Hatch-Waxman Act has been interpreted to give 180 days of generic exclusivity to the first generic company to file for FDA approval, whether or not that company succeeds in invalidating...

We award patents to inventors because we hope to encourage new ideas. For this reason, the fundamental requirement for getting a patent is that you have invented something new.It is curious, then, that patent law itself purports to pay no attention to which aspects of a patentee’s invention...

Repeat patent plaintiffs - those who sue eight or more times on the same patents - have a disproportionate effect on the patent system. They are responsible for a sizeable fraction of all patent lawsuits. Their patents should be among the strongest, according to all economic measures of patent...

Michele Boldrin and David Levine offer a strong attack on intellectual property (IP), which they call “intellectual monopoly.” In their view, IP is not necessary to encourage invention or creation. Quite the contrary, they argue that we get innovation from competition, not monopoly. Further,...

We identify the patents litigated most frequently between 2000 and 2007, and compare those patents to a control set of patents that have been litigated only once in that period. The results are startling. The most litigated patents are far more likely to be software and telecommunications...

Trademark law centers its analysis on consumer confusion. With some significant exceptions, the basic rule of trademark law is that a defendant’s use of a mark is illegal if it confuses a substantial number of consumers and not otherwise. As a general matter, this is the right rule. Trademark...

The United States is the only country in the world that awards patents to the first person to invent something, rather than the first to file a patent application. In order to determine who is first to invent, the United States has created an elaborate set of "interference" proceedings and legal...

Antibodies constitute a staggering $145 billion annual market—an amount projected to almost double by 2026. Consequently, patents covering antibodies are among the most valuable in the patent system. But antibody patents are being struck down left and right, victims of the Federal Circuit’s...

Patent law both imposes a duty on patent applicants to submit relevant prior art to the PTO and assumes that examiners use this information to determine an application's patentability. In this paper, we examine the validity of these assumptions by studying the use made of applicant-submitted...