The standard rationale for patent claims is that they describe the invention and provide notice of patent infringement to competitors. This notice theory, however, is simply untrue—because patent litigation is highly unpredictable, claims do not provide notice of infringement. Accordingly, a large literature argues that claims are valueless, and that courts should instead determine patent scope...

A common misconception exists among many scientists and engineers that a patent gives the owner the right to a particular technology. In fact, a patent does not guarantee the right to make or do anything. Instead, a patent gives the patent owner the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling anything that embodies the technology covered by the patent. When multiple organizations own...

In a model with endogenous number of innovating firms, we show that whether patent protection increases R&D investment is ambiguous, and depends on the market demand function and the cost of R&D. If the market size increases with number of firms, patent protection reduces R&D investment if the cost of R&D is sufficiently high, and higher product differentiation increases the possibility of lowe...

Citations from patents to scientific publications provide useful evidence about the commercial impact of academic research but automatically searchable databases are needed to exploit this connection for large scale patent citation evaluations. Google covers multiple different international patent office databases but does not index patent citations or allow automatic searches. In response, thi...

Patent document retrieval, as a recall-orientated search task, does not allow missing relevant patent documents due to the great commercial value of patents and significant costs of processing a patent application or patent infringement case. Thus, it is important to retrieve all possible relevant documents rather than only a small subset of patents from the top ranked results. However, patents...

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...