The twenty-first century “patent litigation explosion” is not unprecedented. In fact, the nineteenth century saw an … even bigger surge of patent cases. During that era, the most prolific patent enforcers brought hundreds or even thousands … more patent litigation, per U.S. patent in force, than the entire United States in 2013. Even the absolute quantity of late …

This paper derives optimal remedies for patent infringement, examining damages awards and injunctions. The fundamental … social value of the patent is sufficiently high, the optimal award induces socially efficient investment by giving the …

Traditional patent law theories teach that a patent's rights of exclusion are a patent's key benefit to the patentee … and are necessary to make the patent system work. Yet patentees are increasingly giving away such rights, in whole or in … part, as part of a growing phenomenon: patent pledges. In these scenarios, patentees voluntarily commit to limit …

Examination — the process of reviewing a patent application and deciding whether to grant the requested patent … — improves patent quality in two ways. It acts as a substantive screen, filtering out meritless applications and improving … roles, the patent system has a substantial quality problem: it is both too easy to get a patent (because examiners grant …

The patent system is usually described in terms of opposites, like producers versus trolls or software versus pharma …-five years of patent litigation by highly litigious non-practicing entities and randomly selected plaintiffs explores each of … one thousand patent outcomes in more than two thousand cases leads to some surprising findings. For example, while the …

weight in the design of the patent system because patented inventions would have been disclosed anyway. Even the few legal …

, alternative patent: the inclusive patent. The inclusive patent is perceived as a one-sided right geared to include rather than to …. The inclusive patent is further conceived as a registration patent obtainable at low cost. The inclusive patent regime may … be developed as a semi-codified regime where the inclusive patent entitlement is provided by law and the open source …

Competitors embroiled in a patent dispute always prefer to preserve and share monopoly profits, even if the patent is … that their anticompetitive effects are commensurate with the expected result of counterfactual patent litigation, which …

When rivals settle a patent dispute, they prefer to preserve the full monopoly profit, even if the patent is very … from litigation. This avoids the need to estimate the odds of counterfactual patent litigation.This is a previous draft …

We show that examiner-driven variation in patent rights leads to quantitatively large impacts on several patent … outcomes, including patent value, citations, and litigation. Notably, Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) overwhelmingly purchase … conventional companies, and that also have higher invalidity rates. PAEs leverage a specific friction in the patent system, which …