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Software Patents, Incumbents, And Entry, John R. Allison, Abe Dunn, Ronald J. Mann
Software Patents, Incumbents, And Entry, John R. Allison, Abe Dunn, Ronald J. Mann
Faculty Scholarship
Software patents have been controversial since the days when "software" referred to the crude programs that came free with an IBM mainframe. Different perspectives have been presented in judicial, legislative, and administrative fora over the years, and the press has paid as much attention to this issue as it has to any other intellectual property topic during this time. Meanwhile, a software industry developed and has grown to a remarkable size, whether measured by revenues or profitability, number of firms or employees, or research expenditures. The scope of software innovation has become even broader, as an increasing number of devices …
The Disputed Quality Of Software Patents, John R. Allison, Ronald J. Mann
The Disputed Quality Of Software Patents, John R. Allison, Ronald J. Mann
Faculty Scholarship
We analyze the characteristics of the patents held by firms in the software industry. Unlike prior researchers, we rely on the examination of individual patents to determine which patents involve software inventions. This method of identifying the relevant patents is more laborious than the methods that previous scholars have used, but it produces a data set from which we can learn more about the role of patents in the software industry. In general, we find that patents the computer technology firms obtain on software inventions have more prior art references, claims, and forward citations than the patents that the same …
A Marriage Of Convenience? A Comment On The Protection Of Databases, Jane C. Ginsburg
A Marriage Of Convenience? A Comment On The Protection Of Databases, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Daniel Gervais concluded his analysis of the protection of databases with three options for the future. I would like to examine a fourth. Let us assume no future flurry of national or supranational legislative activity because the content of databases is in fact already being protected. Not through copyright or sui generis rights, but through other means. Databases are an object of economic value, and they will conveniently wed whatever legal theory or theories will achieve the practical objective of preventing unauthorized exploitation of the works' contents. To beat the marriage metaphor into the ground, I'd like to suggest that, …