Patent law is crucial to encourage technological innovation. But as the patent system currently stands, diverse industries from pharmaceuticals to software to semiconductors are all governed by the same rules even though they innovate very differently. The result is a crisis in the patent...

Patent law is bogged down in the minutia of claims construction. Claim construction is central to every patent dispute, but it has not provided the hoped-for certainty or notice to competitors. Quite the contrary: disputes about the importance of inventions and the scope of patents have been...

Inherency is a puzzle that runs throughout patent law. Patents are based upon descriptions of technology. However, technologies may have qualities that are unappreciated or unidentified in a patent description, but which are nonetheless present. The law refers to these unknown attributes as...

In theory, we have a unified patent system that provides technology-neutral protection to all kinds of technologies. However, we have recently noticed an increasing divergence between the rules actually applied to different industries. Biotechnology provides one of the best examples. 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...

Because the Internet provides an infrastructure where the marginal costs of distributing digitized information goods is close to zero, it will tend to drive market prices for information goods toward zero. At the same time, by providing “cheap exit” from localized information regulatory...

Patent law offers a set of exclusive rights to innovators, awarding such rights for inventions that meet certain statutory criteria. The statutory requirements for invention incorporate purportedly objective criteria against which new technologies are measured for patent eligibility. For...

Legal governance and regulation is becoming increasingly reliant on data collection and algorithmic data processing. In the area of copyright, on-line protection of digitized works is frequently mediated by algorithmic enforcement systems intended to purge illicit content and limit the liability...