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Full-Text Articles in Business
How To Read A Patent: A Survey Of The Textual Characteristics Of Patent Documents And Strategies For Comprehension, Graham Sherriff
How To Read A Patent: A Survey Of The Textual Characteristics Of Patent Documents And Strategies For Comprehension, Graham Sherriff
Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association
Reading patents is an important activity for inventors and anyone seeking to file or defend a patent, as well as for “exploratory” researchers such as students in a range of disciplines. However, they are notoriously difficult to read. This paper examines the characteristics of patent documents that impair their readability and seeks to identify comprehension strategies and techniques that may alleviate this difficulty. Insights were gathered from a review of the scholarly literature on reading and patent literacy, a survey of patent educators affiliated with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)’s Patent and Trademark Research Center (PTRC) Program, and …
Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte
Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte
Faculty Scholarship
Conventional wisdom has long perceived the patent and tort systems as separate legal entities, each tasked with a starkly different mission. Patent law rewards novel ideas; tort law deters harmful conduct. Against this backdrop, this Essay uncovers the opposing effects of patent and tort law on innovation, introducing the "injurer-innovator problem." Patent law incentivizes injurers --often uniquely positioned to make technological breakthroughs--by allowing them to profit from licensing their inventions to competitors. Yet tort law, by imposing liability for failures to invest in care, forces injurers to incur the cost of implementing their own innovations. When the cost of self-implementation …
A Critical Librarianship Approach For Teaching Patent Searching: Who Becomes An Inventor In America?, Dave Zwicky, Ilana Stonebraker
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
“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
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
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 …
Patents And Market Research: Librarians Partnering To Assist Bioengineering Senior Design Teams, Jennifer L. Groff, Meredith Futral
Patents And Market Research: Librarians Partnering To Assist Bioengineering Senior Design Teams, Jennifer L. Groff, Meredith Futral
Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association
Clemson’s business and engineering librarians have partnered to create a two-step, efficient process to assist Bioengineering Senior Design students in understanding patents and patent searching and market research. Clemson University’s required two-semester Bioengineering Senior Design program matches teams of students with regional clinicians to develop biomedical devices that they research, design, prototype, and test. In the first semester of the program, in which the business and engineering librarians are involved, students take BioE4010-Bioengineering Design Theory. BioE4010 is offered in both the Fall and Spring semesters, but enrollment is significantly higher in the fall. For example, in the Fall of 2021 …
Questioning Authority: Patents And Source Evaluation In An Era Of Misinformation, Jess O'Toole
Questioning Authority: Patents And Source Evaluation In An Era Of Misinformation, Jess O'Toole
Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association
In the world of academic research, patents are classified as primary literature, and are recognized as “a rich source of technical, legal and business information presented in a generally standardized format and often not reproduced anywhere else” (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2015, p.4). Because of their status, patents are often left out of conversations surrounding source credibility and evaluation. Recent news relating to the conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and several patents, however, demonstrates the potential use of patents in spreading misinformation and disinformation. Through applying source evaluation techniques in keeping with the Association of College & Research Libraries’ …
Increasing Investment In Stem Education For Females: Policy Considerations, Becky Harris, Andrea Dassopoulos, Daniel Sahl, Anna Starostina
Increasing Investment In Stem Education For Females: Policy Considerations, Becky Harris, Andrea Dassopoulos, Daniel Sahl, Anna Starostina
UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal
During this difficult economic time, as policy makers decide how to use their limited resources to help prepare the rising generation for the demands of an ever-changing workforce, aligning K-12 educational priorities with higher education and economic development can help maximize public dollar investments in STEM education, particularly when females are given access to STEM and STEM-related education and programs. Smart public policy initiatives can help increase the representation of women in the technology, research and development, and innovation departments.
The purpose of this article is to provide policy recommendations that could help increase gender diversity and participation in STEM …
Broadening The Patent Experience: The Value Of Piug And Attending The Patent Information Users Group (Piug) Annual Conference, Paulina Borrego, Rachel Knapp
Broadening The Patent Experience: The Value Of Piug And Attending The Patent Information Users Group (Piug) Annual Conference, Paulina Borrego, Rachel Knapp
Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association
No abstract provided.
Justice Department's New Position On Patents, Standard Setting, And Injunctions, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Justice Department's New Position On Patents, Standard Setting, And Injunctions, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
A deep split in American innovation policy has arisen between new economy and old economy innovation. In a recent policy statement, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department takes a position that tilts more toward the old economy. Its December, 2019, policy statement on remedies for Standard Essential Patents issued jointly with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology reflects this movement.
The policy statement as a whole contains two noteworthy problems: one is a glaring omission, and the other is a mischaracterization of the scope of antitrust liability. Both positions are strongly …
Frand And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Frand And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This paper considers when a patentee’s violation of a FRAND commitment also violates the antitrust laws. It warns against two extremes. First, is thinking that any violation of a FRAND obligation is an antitrust violation as well. FRAND obligations are contractual, and most breaches of contract do not violate antitrust law. The other extreme is thinking that, because a FRAND violation is a breach of contract, it cannot also be an antitrust violation.
Every antitrust case must consider the market environment in which conduct is to be evaluated. SSOs operated by multiple firms are joint ventures. Antitrust’s role is to …
Regulation And The Marginalist Revolution, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Regulation And The Marginalist Revolution, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The marginalist revolution in economics became the foundation for the modern regulatory State with its “mixed” economy. Marginalism, whose development defines the boundary between classical political economy and neoclassical economics, completely overturned economists’ theory of value. It developed in the late nineteenth century in England, the Continent and the United States. For the classical political economists, value was a function of past averages. One good example is the wage-fund theory, which saw the optimal rate of wages as a function of the firm’s ability to save from previous profits. Another is the theory of corporate finance, which assessed a corporation’s …
Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
A legal system that relies on private property rights to promote economic development must consider that profits can come from two different sources. First, both competition under constant technology and innovation promote economic growth by granting many of the returns to the successful developer. Competition and innovation both increase output, whether measured by quantity or quality. Second, however, profits can come from practices that reduce output, in some cases by reducing quantity, or in others by reducing innovation.
IP rights and competition policy were traditionally regarded as in conflict. IP rights create monopoly, which was thought to be inimical to …
Intellectual Property: Ownership And Protection In A University Setting, Cynthia L. Dahl
Intellectual Property: Ownership And Protection In A University Setting, Cynthia L. Dahl
All Faculty Scholarship
Before an academic entrepreneur may protect or commercialize an invention, they must understand if they own the rights to it. This short chapter helps the inventor to consider the various scenarios that occur in a university setting. It advises the inventor how to seek a waiver from the university if they believe they are the true owner of the invention. If the facts indicate that the invention should be owned by the university, the chapter also discusses how a university decides to formally protect the invention through patent or copyright. Finally, the chapter advises the inventor how to stay involved …
The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty-year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood.
This article provides a litigation field guide for antitrust claims under the rule of reason – or more precisely, for situations when application of the rule of reason is likely. At the time pleadings are drafted and even up …
Reasonable Patent Exhaustion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Reasonable Patent Exhaustion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
A lengthy tug of war between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals may have ended when the Supreme Court held that the sale of a patented article exhausts the patentee seller’s rights to enforce restrictions on that article through patent infringement suits. Further, reversing the Federal Circuit, the parties cannot bargain around this rule through the seller’s specification of conditions stated at the time of sale, no matter how clear. No inquiry need be made into the patentee’s market power, anticompetitive effects, or other types of harms, whether enforcement of the condition is socially costly or …
The Uneasy Case For Patent Federalism, Roger Allan Ford
The Uneasy Case For Patent Federalism, Roger Allan Ford
Law Faculty Scholarship
Nationwide uniformity is often considered an essential feature of the patent system, necessary to fulfill that system’s disclosure and incentive purposes. In the last few years, however, more than half the states have enacted laws that seek to disrupt this uniformity by making it harder for patent holders to enforce their patents. There is an easy case to be made against giving states greater authority over the patent system: doing so would threaten to disrupt the system’s balance between innovation incentives and a robust public domain and would permit rent seeking by states that disproportionately produce or consume innovation.
There …
Buying Monopoly: Antitrust Limits On Damages For Externally Acquired Patents, Erik N. Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Buying Monopoly: Antitrust Limits On Damages For Externally Acquired Patents, Erik N. Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The “monopoly” authorized by the Patent Act refers to the exclusionary power of individual patents. That is not the same thing as the acquisition of individual patent rights into portfolios that dominate a market, something that the Patent Act never justifies and that the antitrust laws rightfully prohibit.
Most patent assignments are procompetitive and serve to promote the efficient commercialization of patented inventions. However, patent acquisitions may also be used to combine substitute patents from external patentees, giving the acquirer an unearned monopoly position in the relevant technology market. A producer requires only one of the substitutes, but by acquiring …
The Patent Spiral, Roger Allan Ford
The Patent Spiral, Roger Allan Ford
Law Faculty Scholarship
Examination — the process of reviewing a patent application and deciding whether to grant the requested patent — improves patent quality in two ways. It acts as a substantive screen, filtering out meritless applications and improving meritorious ones. It also acts as a costly screen, discouraging applicants from seeking low-value patents. Yet despite these dual roles, the patent system has a substantial quality problem: it is both too easy to get a patent (because examiners grant invalid patents that should be filtered out by a substantive screen) and too cheap to do so (because examiners grant low-value nuisance patents that …
A Handbook For Inventors And Innovators: Technology Commercialization At The University Of Nebraska–Lincoln
NUtech Ventures: Publications
OVERVIEW: Director’s Message * Commercialization * Technology Transfer Process * Benefits * Resources
SPONSORED RESEARCH: Process * Bayh-Dole Act * Funding Resources
INVENTION DISCLOSURE: Who * What * When * Why
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: Patent * Other Forms of Intellectual Property * Criteria * Barriers to Patenting * Life of a Patent * University Ownership
COMMERCIALIZATION: Licenses and Licensing Process
NUtech Ventures’ mission is to commercialize technologies generated from the research and creative activities of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Namely, NUtech Ventures seeks to facilitate the transfer of innovations from the “lab to the marketplace” for the benefit of society. This …
Comment To The Sec In Support Of The Enhanced Disclosure Of Patent And Technology License Information, Colleen V. Chien, Jorge Contreras, Carol Corrado, Stuart Graham, Deepak Hedge, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Comment To The Sec In Support Of The Enhanced Disclosure Of Patent And Technology License Information, Colleen V. Chien, Jorge Contreras, Carol Corrado, Stuart Graham, Deepak Hedge, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Faculty Scholarship
Intangible assets like IP constitute a large share of the value of firms, and the US economy generally. Accurate information on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and transactions of publicly-traded firms facilitates price discovery in the market and reduces transaction costs. While public understanding of the innovation economy has been expanded by a large stream of empirical research using patent data, and more recently trademark information this research is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of the data it builds upon. In contrast with information about patents and trademarks, good information about IP licensing is much less publicly …
Antitrust And The Patent System: A Reexamination, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust And The Patent System: A Reexamination, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Since the federal antitrust laws were first passed they have cycled through extreme positions on the relationship between competition law and the patent system. Previous studies of antitrust and patents have generally assumed that patents are valid, discrete, and generally of high quality in the sense that they further innovation. As a result, increasing the returns to patenting increases the incentive to do socially valuable innovation. Further, if the returns to the patentee exceed the social losses caused by increased exclusion, the tradeoff is positive and antitrust should not interfere. If a patent does nothing to further innovation, however, then …
The Rule Of Reason And The Scope Of The Patent, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Rule Of Reason And The Scope Of The Patent, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
For a century and a half the Supreme Court has described perceived patent abuses as conduct that reaches "beyond the scope of the patent." That phrase, which evokes an image of boundary lines in real property, has been applied to both government and private activity and has many different meanings. It has been used offensively to conclude that certain patent uses are unlawful because they extend beyond the scope of the patent. It is also used defensively to characterize activities as lawful if they do not extend beyond the patent's scope. In the first half of the twentieth century the …
Do Patent Licensing Demands Mean Innovation?, Robin C. Feldman, Mark A. Lemley
Do Patent Licensing Demands Mean Innovation?, Robin C. Feldman, Mark A. Lemley
Robin C Feldman
Teece's Competing Through Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Teece's Competing Through Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay reviews David J. Teece's book, Competing Through Innovation: Technological Strategies and Antitrust Policies (2013).
Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo
Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Legal issues increasingly arise in increasingly complex technological contexts. Prominent recent examples include the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), network neutrality, the increasing availability of location information, and the NSA’s surveillance program. Other emerging issues include data privacy, online video distribution, patent policy, and spectrum policy. In short, the rapid rate of technological change has increasingly shown that law and engineering can no longer remain compartmentalized into separate spheres. The logical response would be to embed the interaction between law and policy deeper into the fabric of both fields. An essential step would …
Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Whether antitrust policy should pursue a goal of "general welfare" or "consumer welfare" has been debated for decades. The academic debate is much more varied than the case law, however, which has consistently adopted consumer welfare as a goal, almost never condemning a practice found to produce an actual output reduction or price increase simply because productive efficiency gains accruing to producers exceeded consumer losses.
While some practices such as mergers might produce greater gains in productive efficiency than losses in consumer welfare, identifying such situations would be extraordinarily difficult. First, these efficiencies would have to be "transaction specific," meaning …
Competition For Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Competition For Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Both antitrust and IP law are limited and imperfect instruments for regulating innovation. The problems include high information costs and lack of sufficient knowledge, special interest capture, and the jury trial system, to name a few. More fundamentally, antitrust law and intellectual property law have looked at markets in very different ways. Further, over the last three decades antitrust law has undergone a reformation process that has made it extremely self conscious about its goals. While the need for such reform is at least as apparent in patent and copyright law, very little true reform has actually occurred.
Antitrust has …
Anticompetitive Patent Settlements And The Supreme Court's Actavis Decision, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Anticompetitive Patent Settlements And The Supreme Court's Actavis Decision, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
In FTC v. Actavis the Supreme Court held that settlement of a patent infringement suit in which the patentee of a branded pharmaceutical drug pays a generic infringer to stay out of the market may be illegal under the antitrust laws. Justice Breyer's majority opinion was surprisingly broad, in two critical senses. First, he spoke with a generality that reached far beyond the pharmaceutical generic drug disputes that have provoked numerous pay-for-delay settlements.
Second was the aggressive approach that the Court chose. The obvious alternatives were the rule that prevailed in most Circuits, that any settlement is immune from antitrust …