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George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

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Intellectual Property Law

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Worthless Patents, Kimberly A. Moore Apr 2005

Worthless Patents, Kimberly A. Moore

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

This article presents the first empirical analysis of patent value by examining renewal rate data for nearly 100,000 patents. Finding that 53.7% of all patentees allow their patents to expire for failure to pay maintenance fees confirm common perceptions of patent issuance being a poor measure of innovation value. Even more interesting is the finding that patents which expire for failure to pay maintenance fees share some common identifiable characteristics. In particular, we found that renewed patents had more claims, cited more prior art, received more citations, had more related applications, had more inventors, and spent longer in prosecution. We …


An Economic Analysis Of The Private And Social Costs Of The Provision Of Cybersecurity And Other Public Security Goods, Bruce H. Kobayashi Apr 2005

An Economic Analysis Of The Private And Social Costs Of The Provision Of Cybersecurity And Other Public Security Goods, Bruce H. Kobayashi

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

This paper examines the incentives of private actors to invest in cybersecurity. Prior analyses have examined investments in security goods, such as locks or safes that have the characteristics of private goods. The analysis in this paper extends this analysis to examine expenditures on security goods, such as information, that have the characteristics of public goods. In contrast to the private goods case, where individual uncoordinated security expenditures can lead to an overproduction of security, the public goods case can result in the underproduction of security expenditures, and incentives to free ride. Thus, the formation of collective organizations may be …