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Patent Reform And Differential Impact, Matthew Sag, Kurt W. Rohde

Faculty Articles

The structure of the article is as follows. Part I provides an introduction to the problems created by bad patents and introduces the differential impact test for evaluating patent reform proposals.

Part II examines the origin of bad patents and applies two different economic models to explain their persistence. The first model focuses on a potential infringer’s incentives to challenge a bad patent; the second model focuses on a patent holder’s incentive to assert a patent. We explain bad patents as an emergent phenomenon: they are the product of the apparently low quality of patent examination and the complex, uncertain, …