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A New Look At Patent Quality: Relating Patent Prosecution To Validity, Ronald J. Mann, Marian Underweiser
A New Look At Patent Quality: Relating Patent Prosecution To Validity, Ronald J. Mann, Marian Underweiser
Ronald Mann
The paper uses two hand-collected datasets to implement a novel research design for analyzing the precursors to patent quality. Operationalizing patent "quality" as legal validity, the paper analyzes the relation between Federal Circuit decisions on patent validity and three sets of data about the patents: quantitative features of the patents themselves, textual analysis of the patent documents, and data collected from the prosecution histories of the patents. The paper finds large and statistically significant relations between ex post validity and both textual features of the patents and ex ante aspects of the prosecution history (especially prior art submissions and the …
Software Patents, Incumbents, And Entry, Ronald Mann
Software Patents, Incumbents, And Entry, Ronald Mann
Ronald Mann
Software patents have been controversial since the days when “software” referred to the crude programs that came free with an IBM mainframe. Different perspectives have been presented in judicial, legislative, and administrative fora over the years, and the press has paid as much attention to this issue as it has to any other intellectual property topic during this time. Meanwhile, a software industry developed and has grown to a remarkable size, whether measured by revenues or profitability, number of firms or employees, or research expenditures. The scope of software innovation has become even broader, as an increasing number of devices …