Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Researching The Early History Of The Patent Policy: Getting Started, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

There are a lot of reasons to research the early history of American patent policy. It is an inherently interesting history that provides a framework making contemporary patent policy more comprehensible and a foundation for interpreting historic patent records. For students it provides an opportunity to become familiar with some of basic primary sources that are a staple of research into American history. Also, of course, questions may arise from time to time that can only be authoritatively answered by researching this history.

The approach described below seeks to balance comprehensiveness with feasibility, and emphasizes the importance of creating a …

Patent Value And Citations: Creative Destruction Or Strategic Disruption?, David S. Abrams, Ufuk Akcigit, Jillian Popadak

All Faculty Scholarship

Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more and this view has become standard in the empirical innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to value in fact forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in the middle. Since the value of patents is concentrated in those at the high end, this is a challenge to both the empirical literature and the intuition behind it. We attempt to explain this relationship with a simple model of innovation, allowing for both productive and strategic …

Will International Trade Law Promote Or Inhibit Global Artificial Photosynthesis, Thomas A. Faunce

Thomas A Faunce

Artificial photosynthesis (AP) is an area of well-advanced research involving large international groups at the cutting edge of synthetic biology and nanotechnology. In simple terms it offers to produce a cheap source of hydrogen for fuel through using sunlight to split water, as well as making basic starches by a process involving absorption of carbon dioxide via the enzyme RuBisCO. As the proliferating numbers of university-based research teams working in this area begin to combine, there will be a natural escalation of the expected time for a global roll-out of AP domestic and international devices. Policy attention will then turns …