Law Commons^™

User Innovator Community Norms At The Boundary Between Academic And Industrial Research, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

In this essay, I consider norms of sharing research tools and materials in what has been called Pasteur’s Quadrant, in which basic science and applied research overlap. I employ a user innovation paradigm, along with a rational choice approach to social norms, to address the issue. The convergence of academic research with commercial interests has two different types of consequences for sharing norms. First, a research tool or material developed in a nonprofit research context may be a dual-purpose innovation with both research and nonresearch uses. Thus, for example, a genetic assay may be useful in research and as a …

Norms And The Sharing Of Research Materials And Tacit Knowledge, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

As discussed in Wesley Cohen’s chapter in this volume, recent empirical studies have documented that scientists experience increasing difficulty obtaining tangible research materials from other scientists, while they express fewer concerns than many had anticipated about do-it-yourself tools that can be made in the laboratory, even when those tools are patented. In this Chapter I use a rational choice model of social norms to elucidate some factors that affect the likelihood that a research community will adopt a sharing norm. Based on those factors, I discuss some means by which sharing of tangible research materials can be encouraged. The analysis …

Evolving Innovation Paradigms And The Global Intellectual Property Regime, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

Since the negotiation of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) in 1994, the innovative landscape has undergone dramatic changes due to technological advances in fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and digital communications and computation. The increasing potential for user innovation and open and collaborative innovation has brought an explosion of innovative activity that does not fit into the sales-oriented, mass market model which underlies the global intellectual property regime. In this Article, I argue that the debate over global governance of innovation should be expanded to account more fully for the implications of these changes. For the …

Patent Citation Networks Revisited: Signs Of A Twenty-First Century Change, Katherine J. Strandburg, Gabor Csardi, Laszlo Zalanyi, Jan Tobochnik, Peter Erdi

Katherine J. Strandburg

This Article reports an empirical study of the network composed of patent “nodes” and citation “links” between them. It builds on an earlier study, in which we argued that trends in the growth of the patent citation network provide evidence that the explosive growth in patenting in the late twentieth century was due at least in part to the issuance of increasingly trivial patents. We defined a measure of patent stratification based on comparative probability of citation; an increase in this measure suggests that the USPTO is issuing patents of comparatively less technological significance. Provocatively, we found that stratification increased …

Users As Innovators: Implications For Patent Doctrine, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

User innovators range from commercial firms, which invent new production methods in expectation of competitive advantage, to individual hobbyists motivated entirely by their enjoyment of the inventive process. In this Article, I consider the implications for patent doctrine of the fact that many user innovators derive sufficient benefit simply from developing and using their inventions to motivate them to invest the effort necessary to invent them. Moreover, user innovators often benefit from “freely revealing” their innovations to others. Trade secrecy and patenting are not central to motivating this inventive activity.

This picture of user innovation contrasts sharply with the seller …

What Does The Public Get? Experimental Use And The Patent Bargain, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

This article deals with the increasing tension between the tradition of protecting commercially valuable inventions through patenting and the need for a robust public domain of freely available technical information as a springboard for further research. The “experimental use exemption,” permitting some unauthorized research uses of patented inventions, might be used to relieve some of this tension. However, the scope of the research exemption has been shrunk so far by recent Federal Circuit opinions that even basic university research is not excused from infringement liability. This article returns to the first principles of patent law -- the incentives to invent …