Science and Technology Law Commons^™

Competition And Innovation: The Breakup Of Ig Farben, Felix Poege

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between competition and innovation is difficult to disentangle, as exogenous variation in market structure is rare. The 1952 breakup of Germany’s leading chemical company, IG Farben, represents such a disruption. After the Second World War, the Allies occupying Germany imposed the breakup because of IG Farben’s importance for the German war economy instead of standard antitrust concerns. In technology areas where the breakup reduced concentration, patenting increased strongly, driven by domestic firms unrelated to IG Farben. An analysis of patent texts shows that an increased propensity to patent does not drive the effect. Descriptively, IG Farben’s successors increased …

Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

People of color and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM”) fields in the United States. Through both intentional and unintentional structural barriers, universities continue to lose valuable intellectual resources by perpetuating a lack of gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as people climb the academic ladder. Identifying racial and gender disparities between university campus populations and their patent representation quantifies the qualitatively observed systemic racism and sexism plaguing STEM. Although many have written about racial and gender underrepresentation in STEM, no author has ever endeavored to simultaneously quantify the racial and gender gap at universities in the …

Homography Of Inventorship: Dabus And Valuing Inventors, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

On July 28, 2021, the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience ("DAB US") became the first computer to be recognized as a patent inventor. Due to the advocacy of DAB US's inventor, Dr. Stephen Thaler, the world's definition of "inventor" has finally fractured - dividing patent regimes between recognition of machine inventorship and lack thereof This division has sparked many scholarly conversations about inventorship contribution, but none have discussed the implications of a homographic inventorship.

This Article addresses the implications of international homographic inventorship - where countries have different notions and rules concerning patent inventorship - and the …

Who Benefits?: How The Aia Hurt Deceptively Non-Joined Inventors, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Congress enacted the America Invents Act (“AIA”) to bolster economic development, sustain American innovation, and protect American jobs. This pro-business legislation, however, overlooked one actor critical to any successful innovation endeavor: the inventor. The AIA created access barriers, preventing inventors from efficiently and effectively seeking the entire remedy spectrum to which they are entitled. Paul Morinville and others have opined that the new first-to-file system put small inventors out of business, naming the AIA the single worst disaster in the history of the U.S. patent system. Beyond the filing and subject matter changes, the AIA created fundamental access to justice …

Diffusing New Technology Without Dissipating Rents: Some Historical Case Studies Of Knowledge Sharing, James Bessen, Alessandro Nuvolari

Faculty Scholarship

The diffusion of innovations is supposed to dissipate inventors’ rents. Yet in many documented cases, inventors freely shared knowledge with their competitors. Using a model and case studies, this article explores why sharing did not eliminate inventors’ incentives. Each new technology coexisted with an alternative for one or more decades. This allowed inventors to earn rents while sharing knowledge, attaining major productivity gains. The technology diffusion literature suggests that such circumstances are common during the early stages of a new technology.

Automation And Predictive Analytics In Patent Prosecution: Uspto Implications And Policy, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial-intelligence technological advancements bring automation and predictive analytics into patent prosecution. The information asymmetry between inventors and patent examiners is expanded by artificial intelligence, which transforms the inventor-examiner interaction to machine-human interactions. In response to automated patent drafting, automated office-action responses, "cloems" (computer-generated word permutations) for defensive patenting, and machine-learning guidance (based on constantly updated patent-prosecution big data), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should reevaluate patent-examination policy from economic, fairness, time, and transparency perspectives. By conceptualizing the inventor-examiner relationship as a "patenting market," economic principles suggest stronger efficiencies if both inventors and the USPTO have better information …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Law, Business, And Economics Scholars In Alice Corp. V. Cls Bank, No. 13-298, Jason Schultz, Brian Love, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Circuit’s expansion of patentable subject matter in the 1990s led to a threefold increase in software patents, many of which contain abstract ideas merely tethered to a general-purpose computer. There is little evidence, however, to suggest this expansion has produced an increase in software innovation. The software industry was highly innovative in the decade immediately prior to this expansion, when the viability of software patentability was unclear and software patents were few. When surveyed, most software developers oppose software patenting, and, in practice, software innovators tend to rely on other tools to capture market share such as first-mover …

Patent Litigation And The Internet, Samantha Zyontz, John R. Allison, Emerson H. Tiller, Tristan Bligh

Faculty Scholarship

Patent infringement litigation has not only increased dramatically in frequency over the past few decades,¹ but also has also seen striking growth in both stakes and cost.² Although a relatively rich literature has added much to our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of patent litigation during the past two decades,³ many interesting questions remain inadequately addressed. The nuances of and trends in patent litigation in different technology fields and industries, for example, are still understudied.⁴ Litigation of patents on new technologies has likewise received a dearth of attention. Here we seek to help begin …

Sequential Innovation, Patents, And Imitation, James Bessen, Eric Maskin

Faculty Scholarship

How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary--as it certainly has been in those industries--competition can increase firms' future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980?s provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among …

What's Wrong With The Patent System? Fuzzy Boundaries And The Patent Tax, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The annual number of patent lawsuits filed in the U.S. has roughly tripled from 1970 to 2004. The number of suits was more or less steady in the 1970s, climbed slowly in the 1980s, and exploded in the 1990s. Why? The usual answers point to (1) the growth of the “new economy” and the concomitant explosion of patenting, (2) the failure of the Patent Office to reject patents on old or obvious inventions, or (3) the rise of the patent troll. There is an element of truth in all these answers, but even collectively they do a poor job explaining …

An Empirical Look At Software Patents, James Bessen, Robert M. Hunt

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequately explained by changes in R&D investments, employment of computer programmers, or productivity growth. The residual increase in patent propensity is consistent with a sizeable rise in the cost effectiveness of software patents during the 1990s. We find evidence …

Race-Ing Patents/Patenting Race: An Emerging Political Geography Of Intellectual Property In Biotechnology, Jonathan Kahn

Faculty Scholarship

This article applies insights from critical race theory to examine an emerging phenomenon in biotechnology research and product development. The strategic use of race as a genetic category to obtain patent protection and drug approval. A dramatic rise in the use of race in biotechnology patents indicates that researchers and affiliated commercial enterprises are coming to see social categories of race as presenting opportunities for gaining, extending, or protecting monopoly market protection for an array of biotechnological products and services. Racialized patents are also providing the basis for similarly race-based clinical trial designs, drug development, capital raising and marketing strategies …

Patents And The Diffusion Of Technical Information, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Does the disclosure requirement of the patent system encourage the diffusion of inventions? This paper builds a simple model where firms choose between patents and trade secrecy to protect inventions. Diffusion is not necessarily more likely with a patent system nor is the market for technology necessarily greater.

The Software Patent Experiment, Robert M. Hunt, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, the scope of technologies that can be patented has been expanded to include many items previously thought unsuitable for patenting, for example, computer software. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants 20,000 or more software patents a year. Conventional wisdom holds that extending patent protection to computer programs will stimulate research and development and, thus, increase the rate of innovation. In this article, Bob Hunt and Jim Bessen investigate whether this has, in fact, happened. They describe the spectacular growth in software patenting, who obtains patents, and the relationship between a sharp focus on …

Patent Thickets: Strategic Patenting Of Complex Technologies, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Patent race models assume that an innovator wins the only patent covering a product. But when technologies are complex, this property right is defective: ownership of a product's technology is shared, not exclusive. In that case I show that if patent standards are low, firms build "thickets" of patents, especially incumbent firms in mature industries. When they assert these patents, innovators are forced to share rents under cross-licenses, making R&D incentives sub-optimal. On the other hand, when lead time advantages are significant and patent standards are high, firms pursue strategies of "mutual non-aggression." Then R&D incentives are stronger, even optimal.

Inventions, Industry Standards, And Intellectual Property, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

When an industry standard incorporates a patented invention, the demand for products that comply with the standard has two components. Some of the demand may be for the inherent technical advantages of the invention; the patentee is generally entitled to revenues attributable to this demand. But some of the demand is for the benefits of standardization, such as interoperability, and the patentee is not entitled to revenues attributable to this demand. From this point, the article draws two conclusions. First, the amounts to which a patentee is entitled, either in litigation or in licensing negotiations, should be calculated by determining …