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Full-Text Articles in Law
Patent Portfolios, Gideon Parchomovsky, R. Polk Wagner
Patent Portfolios, Gideon Parchomovsky, R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
This article presents a new theory of patent value, responding to growing empirical evidence that the traditional appropriability premise of patents is fundamentally incomplete in the modern innovation environment. We find that for patents, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: the true value of patents lies not in their individual worth, but in their aggregation into a collection of related patents, a patent portfolio. The patent portfolio theory thus explains what is known as “the patent paradox”: in recent years patent intensity—patents obtained per research and development dollar—has risen dramatically even as the expected value of …
Disclosure As A Strategy In The Patent Race, Scott Baker, Claudio Mezzetti
Disclosure As A Strategy In The Patent Race, Scott Baker, Claudio Mezzetti
Scholarship@WashULaw
Research firms disclose a surprisingly large amount of information to the patent office through “targeted” disclosures, that is, disclosures intended to make the patent office aware of potentially patentable information. Conventional wisdom holds that these disclosures are made for defensive purposes; the disclosing firm does not itself plan to pursue patents related to the disclosed information, so the firm discloses to create prior art that might stop rivals from patenting. But firms have an incentive to disclose even if they intend to pursue patent protection. The reason is that, by making it more difficult to patent, disclosure extends the patent …