Despite the obvious values of the patent systems of the world (see reference 1 for a review), there remain several aspects of patents that irritate not only members of the general public, but also some scientists, particularly those iwhose work is dependent on patented products produced by industry. One of these irritants concerns the apparent monopoly afforded by law to the patentee. Another i...

In order to extract bilingual terms in a corpus of comparable patents, we present a novel framework in this paper. The framework includes the following major steps: 1) extract monolingual single-word and multi-word term candidates in monolingual patents; 2) Find parallel sentences in comparable patents; 3) extract bilingual single-word and multi-word term candidates; 4) identify correct bilingu...

Two utilitarian defenses, traceable to Bentham and Mill, are commonly offered for patents. It is contended that patents induce innovation, and that patents induce disclosure of innovation. Patents on some or all of the human genome pose particular challenges for these defenses. In the first instance, patents on nucleotide sequences entail the perverse notion of human reproduction qua infringeme...