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Poisoning The Next Apple? The America Invents Act And Individual Inventors, David S. Abrams, R. Polk Wagner
Poisoning The Next Apple? The America Invents Act And Individual Inventors, David S. Abrams, R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the most significant patent law reform effort in two generations, has a dark side: It seems likely to decrease the patenting behavior of small inventors, a category which occupies special significance in American innovation history. In this paper we empirically predict the effects of the major change in the law: a shift in the patent priority rules from the United States’ traditional “first-to-invent” system to the predominant “first-to-file” system. While there has been some theoretical work on this topic, we use the Canadian experience with a similar change as a natural experiment to shed …
Unenforceability, Lee Petherbridge Ph.D., Jason Rantanen, R. Polk Wagner
Unenforceability, Lee Petherbridge Ph.D., Jason Rantanen, R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
The patent doctrine of inequitable conduct—which allows a patent to be held unenforceable on the basis of misbehavior by the applicant during patent prosecution—has been the subject of intense criticism from the bench and bar alike. And yet to date there has been no systematic attempt to determine whether the doctrine is or is not working as theorized. This study fills that gap. We evaluate the performance of the inequitable conduct doctrine with a novel methodological approach: by empirically characterizing the differences between patents found unenforceable and several other types of patents (unlitigated, litigated, invalid, obvious, and underdisclosed), we use …