Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Improving Patent Quality With Applicant Incentives, Stephen Yelderman
Improving Patent Quality With Applicant Incentives, Stephen Yelderman
Stephen Yelderman
This Article offers an alternative approach to the widely recognized problem of low-quality patents being granted by the patent office. Traditional reforms have focused almost exclusively on making the patent office more effective at examination. This Article instead looks at patent quality from an applicant’s perspective, and evaluates how certain patent rules might be encouraging inventors to file higher or lower quality claims. It proposes a variety of reforms to take advantage of applicants’ existing interests in obtaining patents that are both broad enough to create infringing activity and narrow enough to be valid. The result is a distinctive set …
International Cooperation And The Patent-Antitrust Intersection, Stephen Yelderman
International Cooperation And The Patent-Antitrust Intersection, Stephen Yelderman
Stephen Yelderman
Commentators have long recognized the need to coordinate questions at the patent-antitrust intersection with other policy levers available under patent law. In the international context, however, control over patent policy has been fractured and entrusted to diverse decisionmakers. Many details of patent law are tightly coordinated by international agreement, while others related to antitrust are left to national discretion. This Article evaluates the consequences of this fracture, and notes ways in which the prevailing treaty regimes (the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement) distort incentives for national policymaking. National discretion at the patent-antitrust intersection can be expected to result in …