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Full-Text Articles in Law
Growing Pains In The Administrative State: The Patent Office’S Troubled Quest For Managerial Control, Arti K. Rai
Growing Pains In The Administrative State: The Patent Office’S Troubled Quest For Managerial Control, Arti K. Rai
Faculty Scholarship
In the last ten years, the workload of the Patent and Trademark Office ("PTO") has increased dramatically. Complaints about the PTO's ability to manage its workload have increased in tandem. Interestingly, although Congress has explicitly given the PTO rulemaking authority over the processing of patent applications, and withheld from it authority over "substantive" patent law, the PTO has arguably enjoyed more success in influencing substantive law than in executing direct efforts to manage its workload. This Article explores the multiple, mutually reinforcing reasons for this anomaly. It argues that although there are good reasons to be frustrated with the PTO's …
University Software Ownership And Litigation: A First Examination, Arti K. Rai, John R. Allison, Bhaven N. Sampat, Colin Crossman
University Software Ownership And Litigation: A First Examination, Arti K. Rai, John R. Allison, Bhaven N. Sampat, Colin Crossman
Faculty Scholarship
Software patents and university-owned patents represent two of the most controversial intellectual property developments of the last twenty-five years. Despite this reality, and concerns that universities act as "patent trolls" when they assert software patents in litigation against successful commercializers, no scholar has systematically examined the ownership and litigation of university software patents. In this Article, we present the first such examination. Our empirical research reveals that software patents represent a significant and growing proportion of university patent holdings. Additionally, the most important determinant of the number of software patents a university owns is not its research and development ("R&D") …