For NTCIR Workshop 7 UC Berkeley participated in both IR4QA and the Patent Mining Tasks. This paper summarizes our approach to Patent Mining. Our focus was upon the US Patent collection, and our methodology was to treat patent mining as an information retrieval task and to aggregate multiple patent classifications from retrieved patent documents. The performance was relatively poor, possibly be...

-Patent is one kind of the intellectual property, and the nature of patent institution is to accelerate the speed of innovation and invention. It is likely to the patent of computer software. But the opinion voiced by exponents of open source and free software is extremely opposed to patenting computer software. They are concerned the software patent acts as a barrier to technology improvement....

This study investigates whether patent subsidy programs to promote regional innovations have generated a large volume of low-quality applications in China, resulting in biased patent statistics as an indicator for innovations. We find that subsidies on patent filing fees encouraged the filing of low-quality patents, resulting in a decreased grant rate. Although grant-contingent rewards increase...

We study how fragmentation of patent rights (‘patent thickets’) and the formation of the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts faster settlement agreements when patent rights are fragmented and when there is less uncertainty abou...

Patent deployment has become competition strength for companies. The intelligence property can keep the competition advantage of a company from opponents through the patent deployment which can be visualized by the patent map technique. The patent map is an important strategic tool for establishing design strategies. Our past efforts studied the visualization transformation techniques in design...

Within patent law, there are two primary mechanisms that attempt to afford the appropriate balance between patent owners and subsequent inventors. First are the disclosure doctrines: a patent applicant cannot claim more than what she has actually disclosed in the patent application. A claim that is overly broad because it lacks adequate support in the patent specification is invalid. There is a...

When two inventors file patent applications with overlapping, or “interfering” claims, the U.S. patent rights are awarded to the applicant who establishes priority of invention. Patent interference cases are litigated at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. The cases offer a unique window into competition between firms in research and innovation. Thi...

In this paper, I systematically analyze the new Japanese Patent Law and make a comparative study on Chinese and Japanese Patent Law to shed a new light on the improvement of the legal system of intellectual property in China. To begin with, I review the historical development of Japanese Patent Law and the modern patent legal system in Japan. Next, the aim and contents of the latest revision of...