The United States International Trade Commission has recently experienced a dramatic increase in patent infringement investigations under section sign 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. In fact, the number of patent enforcement actions submitted to the ITC has nearly doubled in the last five years. Patent holders are selecting this forum because of its speedy proceedings and its ability to award br...

Patent application numbers grow exponentially in many industries, a phenomenon that has been linked to high fragmentation of patent ownership. Contradicting these findings and theoretical arguments, we show that such fragmentation is not a precondition for sudden and strong increases in patenting. We describe and analyze a patent portfolio race in an industry with highly concentrated patent own...

S | 48 An Agency Theory of Patent Law: Linking Innovators and Invention Users Richard Gruner Professor, John Marshall Law School Chicago, IL This article presents a reinterpretation of patent laws as components of agency relationships linking innovators and innovation users. In these relationships, patent rights substitute for privately negotiated contract terms tying the interests of persons w...

Patent pools do not correct all problems associated with patent thickets. In this respect, patent pools might not stop the outsider problem from striking pools. Moreover, patent pools can be expensive to negotiate, can exclude patent holders with smaller numbers of patents or enable a group of major players to form a cartel that excludes new competitors. For all the above reasons, patent pools ...

Information pertaining to the patent system is scattered not only across the patent domain, but also across other scientific and regulatory domains. In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in scientific and regulatory documents related to the patent system. In this project, the use of networks and network analyses is applied to an Information Retrieval (IR) problem in the patent dom...

A patent gives a patent holder (the “patentee”) the exclusive right to make, use, import, and sell his or her invention. The quid pro quo for obtaining a patent on an invention is disclosing in the patent how to make and use the invention. For this reason, a patent application must contain a detailed disclosure that teaches how to make and use the invention. Normally, this disclosure consists o...

-In this paper, we address the problem of patent valuation. With this aim in view, we focus on the feasibility and reliability of a patent rating system. This leads us to develop a structural model of patent renewal decisions based on real options that links patent renewals and patent value and to estimate it on micro level data. Results for a sample of European patents show that unobserved het...

This paper reports our experimental results at the NTCIR-6 English Patent Retrieval Subtask. Our previous participation at the patent retrieval Subtask revealed that the long length of the patent applications require less smoothing of the document model than general documents such as news paper articles. We setup the initial baseline retrieval system for U.S. patent applications and compare the...

Patent analysts predict trends in research and the business environment by studying the numbers and classifications of patents issued to companies around the world. Those attempts are often affected by the changes taking place in international treaties, governments, patent laws, patent classification systems, and corporate mergers and acquisitions. This paper describes some of the changes in th...

This paper investigates the effect of the threat and occurrence of patent litigation on the private value of patent protection. Potential challenges are introduced into a renewal model as a factor in patentee decisions as to whether a patent is worth maintaining. The model yields testable predictions about renewal probabilities. Data for post WWII German patents support the hypothesis that the ...