Software innovation is transforming the U.S. economy. Yet our understanding of how patents and patent transactions … support this innovation is limited by a lack of public information about patent licenses and sales. Claims about the patent … marketplace, for example, extolling the virtues of intermediaries like non–practicing entities, or characterizing software patent …

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 …

Patent scope is one of the important aspects in the debates over “patent quality.” The purported decrease in patent … licensing and litigation costs. However, these debates often occur without well-defined measurements of patent scope. This paper … explores two very simple metrics for measuring patent scope based on claim language: independent claim length and independent …

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 …

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 …

rights (IPR) regimes. Weak IPR regimes usually feature weak patent enforcement, such as relatively low level of compensation … among utility models- the type of patents inferior to invention patents. I also document that China’s patent infringement …. These empirical patterns suggest that weak IPR regimes might create a “lemon market” for patent protection in which truly …

century. In addition to the funding agency, the data report whether the government has title to the patent ("title" patents …) or funded a patent assigned to a private organization ("license" patents). The data include a large number of "license …" patents that cannot be linked to government funding from patent text or other sources. Combining the historical data with …

This research explores the cultural origins of observed differences in the strength of patent rights across countries …. The analysis establishes empirically that pairwise differences in patent rights strength between countries are associated … patent rights institutions. The study also reveals that the strength of patent rights has been determined by the prevalence …

A bedrock principle of patent law is that old inventions cannot be patented. And a new use for an old invention does … not render the old invention patentable. This is because patent law requires novelty—an invention must be new. But while a …, new-use patents comprise a significant part of the patent landscape—particularly in pharmaceuticals, when drug companies …

The economic literature emphasizes the importance of patent citations, particularly forward citations, as an indicator … of a cited patent’s value. Studies have refined which forward citations are better indicators of value, focusing on … examiner citations for example. We test a metric that arguably is closer tied to private value—the substantive use of a patent …