output. Research units that source research ideas from small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) patent more, but not more …

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) grants many weak patents that would be ruled invalid if subjected … increase the accuracy of patent examinations. Others argue that the costs of such reform would outweigh the benefits; weak … patents reveal the “rational ignorance” of the Patent Office; it is optimal to leave examiners unequipped to identify more …

mechanism whereby later inventors are allowed to share the patent if they discover within a certain time period of the first … granting monopolies. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the time window where later inventors can share the patent should become … breadth and the length of the patent and could allow sorting between more or less efficient firms in a differentiated patent …

The progression toward reevaluating patent validity in the administrative, rather than judicial, setting became overtly … substitutionary in the America Invents Act. No longer content to encourage court litigants to rely on Patent Office expertise for … emergent border between court and agency power in the U.S. patent system. By design, the border is not absolute. Concurrent …

The paper investigates whether patent fees are an effective mechanism to deter the filing of low-quality patent … applications. The study analyzes the effect on patent quality of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1982, which resulted in a … substantial increase in patenting fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Results from a series of difference …

Novelty is a basic requirement of patent law. An inventor cannot obtain a patent if the invention exists in the “prior …-filed patent document qualifies as prior art as of its filing date — even though the document does not become accessible to the … invention to the public; administrative delay of public accessibility due to Patent Office procedures should not count against …

the strengthening of the double patenting prohibition: preventing extending exclusive rights beyond the original patent … the inventor in two patents and (2) only applying the prohibition when the earlier patent did not satisfy the technical … meaning of “prior art” within §102 of the Patent Act. The rulings weakening the double patenting doctrine have disregarded …

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 …

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