Over the last twenty years, a quiet revolution has taken place in patent law. Traditionally,
patents were rarely valid, but if valid, broadly enforced. Since Congress created the Federal …

The problem of access to the patent system, particularly for small enterprises, 1 currently
dominates the patent policy debate internationally. Although the access problem can be …

About half, probably more, of all patented inventions in the United States are never
commercially exploited.'Many of these undeveloped inventions are commercially worthless …

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (Patent Office or USPTO)" has recently come
under increasing scrutiny for the quality of the examinations to which patent applications are …

Why do firms in some industries ignore patents when developing new products? This paper
posits a simple answer to this longpuzzling question: firms ignore patents because they are …

Abstract The United States Patent and Trademark Office has acquired a well-deserved
reputation for inefficacy and inefficiency. Proposals for reforming the patent office have thus …

Patent law as a field of academic study has benefited enor-mously from the attention of
economists. Indeed, law professors are relative newcomers to the academic patent field …

Those who possess property for a limited time tend to exercise less care with it than do those
who expect to own the property in perpetuity. For example, an individual renting a car may …

In recent years the patent system has come under trenchant criticism. There is a general
consensus that the system is both broken and a failure. 1 Many be-lieve the root cause of the …

A simple model is developed to study royalty negotiations between a patent holder and a
downstream firm whose product is more valuable if it includes a feature covered by the …