Business Commons^™

A Critical Librarianship Approach For Teaching Patent Searching: Who Becomes An Inventor In America?, Dave Zwicky, Ilana Stonebraker

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

The ways in which a technology is invented, owned, and approved are strongly influenced by the same oppressive and exclusionary structures that critical librarianship interrogates. Patents, limited-term grants of rights to inventions, are issued to inventors in exchange for detailed specifications of the invention. This paper examines current practices used by business librarians in teaching students how to find patents and how these practices could be critically informed given the nature of the United States patent system as it exists today. An output of this work is a suggested lesson plan with recommended resources.

“That Means Nothing To Me As A Normal Person Who Doesn't Know About Patents”: Usability Testing Of Google Patents And Patent Public Search With Undergraduate Engineering Students, Graham Sherriff, Molly Rogers

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

Patent searching is an important research tool for undergraduate engineering students, yet it requires special topic knowledge to conduct successfully. Patent database websites have the ability to alleviate or add to the complexity of patent searching, depending on their usability. Prompted by the launch of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Public Search (PPS) website in early 2022, the authors investigated the usability of PPS and Google Patents. The study's objective was to gain insights into the ways in which the websites of commonly-used patent databases support undergraduate students’ patent searching activities. The study examined students’ performance of typical …

A Case Study Of The Complicated History Of Rice University’S First Patents, Hannah G. Edlund

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

Digitization and online public databases have made patent searches a much simpler pursuit in recent years. However, uncovering a pre-digital era patent’s history and context remains challenging. A search for the first patents assigned to Rice University highlighted associated issues. Older patent formats often do not clearly indicate inventor-assignee relationships, and applications and official communications are not available online. To determine how Rice came to own three 1948 patents, extensive archival research was required. Were these patents assigned to the University by inventors, independent of its support or funding, or was their work performed at and for Rice, thus obliging …

Antitrust Interoperability Remedies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Compelled interoperability can be a useful remedy for dominant firms, including large digital platforms, who violate the antitrust laws. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so much to economic growth.

Given the wide variety of structures and business models for big tech, “interoperability” must be defined broadly. It can realistically include everything from “dynamic” interoperability that requires real time sharing of data and operations, to “static” interoperability which requires portability but not necessarily real time interactions. Also included are the compelled sharing of intellectual property or …