Patents A patent is the legal right of an inventor to exclude others from making or using a particular invention. This right is sometimes termed an 'intellectual property right' and is viewed as an encouragement for innovation. This article gives a brief history of patenting, and discusses the legal and administrative process for obtaining a patent in the major world jurisdictions. Evidence on ...

Most of the searches a patent expert at a patent o ce does are using boolean methods to query large databases of patent data. The Clef-Ip evaluation track is designed to experiment with information retrieval techniques on the patent domain. The data corpus in the Clef-Ip Lab consists of patent documents published by the European Patent Ofce. One of the main tasks in the Lab has been related to ...

The Supreme Court does understand patent law. This invited Essay responds to Federal Circuit Judge Dyk’s remarks at the Chicago-Kent Supreme Court IP Review, in particular, his observation that the patent “bar and the academy have expressed skepticism that the Supreme Court understands patent law well enough to make the governing rules” (a view Judge Dyk did not endorse). The idea that the Supr...

Technolgical standards give rise to a complements problem that affects pricing and innovation incentives of technology producers. In this paper I discuss how patent pools can be used to solve these problems and what incentives patent holders have to form a patent pool. I offer some suggestions how competition authorities can foster the formation of welfare increasing patent pools.