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Gat, Solvay, And The Centralization Of Patent Litigation In Europe, Marketa Trimble Jan 2012

Gat, Solvay, And The Centralization Of Patent Litigation In Europe, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.


Scaling The Patent System, Christina Mulligan, Timothy B. Lee Jan 2012

Scaling The Patent System, Christina Mulligan, Timothy B. Lee

Scholarly Works

Why do firms in some industries ignore patents when developing new products? This paper posits a simple but novel answer to this long-puzzling question: firms ignore patents because they are unable to discover the patents their activities might infringe. The costs of finding relevant patents, which we call discovery costs, are prohibitively high.

Not all industries face high patent discovery costs. Chemical patents are "indexable," meaning that relevant patents can be efficiently retrieved by chemical formula. As a result, discovery costs in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are low, and inadvertent infringement by firms in these industries is rare. But …