Patent Failure

Patent Failure PDF Author: James Bessen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400828694
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
In recent years, business leaders, policymakers, and inventors have complained to the media and to Congress that today's patent system stifles innovation instead of fostering it. But like the infamous patent on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much of the cited evidence about the patent system is pure anecdote--making realistic policy formation difficult. Is the patent system fundamentally broken, or can it be fixed with a few modest reforms? Moving beyond rhetoric, Patent Failure provides the first authoritative and comprehensive look at the economic performance of patents in forty years. James Bessen and Michael Meurer ask whether patents work well as property rights, and, if not, what institutional and legal reforms are necessary to make the patent system more effective. Patent Failure presents a wide range of empirical evidence from history, law, and economics. The book's findings are stark and conclusive. While patents do provide incentives to invest in research, development, and commercialization, for most businesses today, patents fail to provide predictable property rights. Instead, they produce costly disputes and excessive litigation that outweigh positive incentives. Only in some sectors, such as the pharmaceutical industry, do patents act as advertised, with their benefits outweighing the related costs. By showing how the patent system has fallen short in providing predictable legal boundaries, Patent Failure serves as a call for change in institutions and laws. There are no simple solutions, but Bessen and Meurer's reform proposals need to be heard. The health and competitiveness of the nation's economy depend on it.

Patent Failure

Patent Failure PDF Author: James Bessen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400828694
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
In recent years, business leaders, policymakers, and inventors have complained to the media and to Congress that today's patent system stifles innovation instead of fostering it. But like the infamous patent on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much of the cited evidence about the patent system is pure anecdote--making realistic policy formation difficult. Is the patent system fundamentally broken, or can it be fixed with a few modest reforms? Moving beyond rhetoric, Patent Failure provides the first authoritative and comprehensive look at the economic performance of patents in forty years. James Bessen and Michael Meurer ask whether patents work well as property rights, and, if not, what institutional and legal reforms are necessary to make the patent system more effective. Patent Failure presents a wide range of empirical evidence from history, law, and economics. The book's findings are stark and conclusive. While patents do provide incentives to invest in research, development, and commercialization, for most businesses today, patents fail to provide predictable property rights. Instead, they produce costly disputes and excessive litigation that outweigh positive incentives. Only in some sectors, such as the pharmaceutical industry, do patents act as advertised, with their benefits outweighing the related costs. By showing how the patent system has fallen short in providing predictable legal boundaries, Patent Failure serves as a call for change in institutions and laws. There are no simple solutions, but Bessen and Meurer's reform proposals need to be heard. The health and competitiveness of the nation's economy depend on it.

Patent Politics

Patent Politics PDF Author: Shobita Parthasarathy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643785X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Introduction -- Defining the public interest in the US and European patent systems -- Confronting the questions of life-form patentability -- Commodification, animal dignity, and patent-system publics -- Forging new patent politics through the human embryonic stem cell debates -- Human genes, plants, and the distributive implications of patents -- Conclusion

A Patent System for the 21st Century

A Patent System for the 21st Century PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309089107
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
The U.S. patent system is in an accelerating race with human ingenuity and investments in innovation. In many respects the system has responded with admirable flexibility, but the strain of continual technological change and the greater importance ascribed to patents in a knowledge economy are exposing weaknesses including questionable patent quality, rising transaction costs, impediments to the dissemination of information through patents, and international inconsistencies. A panel including a mix of legal expertise, economists, technologists, and university and corporate officials recommends significant changes in the way the patent system operates. A Patent System for the 21st Century urges creation of a mechanism for post-grant challenges to newly issued patents, reinvigoration of the non-obviousness standard to quality for a patent, strengthening of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, simplified and less costly litigation, harmonization of the U.S., European, and Japanese examination process, and protection of some research from patent infringement liability.

Forgotten Intellectual Property Lore

Forgotten Intellectual Property Lore PDF Author: Shubha Ghosh
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1788978714
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
This innovative book explores forgotten disputes over intellectual property and the ways in which creative people and sovereigns have managed these disputes throughout the centuries. With a focus on reform, it raises important questions about the resilience of legal rules and challenges the methodology behind traditional legal analyses. Focusing on lore and traditions, expert contributors incorporate contextual understandings that are rooted in history, sociology, political science, and literary studies into their analyses.

21st Century Innovation Systems for Japan and the United States

21st Century Innovation Systems for Japan and the United States PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309136628
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Recognizing that a capacity to innovate and commercialize new high-technology products is increasingly a key for the economic growth in the environment of tighter environmental and resource constraints, governments around the world have taken active steps to strengthen their national innovation systems. These steps underscore the belief of these governments that the rising costs and risks associated with new potentially high-payoff technologies, their spillover or externality-generating effects and the growing global competition, require national R&D programs to support the innovations by new and existing high-technology firms within their borders. The National Research Council's Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) has embarked on a study of selected foreign innovation programs in comparison with major U.S. programs. The "21st Century Innovation Systems for the United States and Japan: Lessons from a Decade of Change" symposium reviewed government programs and initiatives to support the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises, government-university- industry collaboration and consortia, and the impact of the intellectual property regime on innovation. This book brings together the papers presented at the conference and provides a historical context of the issues discussed at the symposium.

Government Policy toward Open Source Software

Government Policy toward Open Source Software PDF Author: Robert W. Hahn
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815717058
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Can open source software—software that is usually available without charge and that individuals are free to modify—survive against the fierce competition of proprietary software, such as Microsoft Windows? Should the government intervene on its behalf? This book addresses a host of issues raised by the rapid growth of open source software, including government subsidies for research and development, government procurement policy, and patent and copyright policy. Contributors offer diverse perspectives on a phenomenon that has become a lightning rod for controversy in the field of information technology. Contributors include James Bessen (Research on Innovation), David S. Evans (National Economic Research Associates), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University), Bradford L. Smith (Microsoft Corporation), and Robert W. Hahn (director, AEI-Brookings Joint Center).

The Battle Over Patents

The Battle Over Patents PDF Author: Stephen H. Haber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019757615X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
An examination of how the patent system works, imperfections and all, to incentivize innovation Do patents facilitate or frustrate innovation? Lawyers, economists, and politicians who have staked out strong positions in this debate often attempt to validate their claims by invoking the historical record--but they frequently get the history wrong. The Battle over Patents gets it right. Bringing together thoroughly researched essays from prominent historians and social scientists, this volume traces the long and contentious history of patents and examines how they have worked in practice. Editors Stephen H. Haber and Naomi R. Lamoreaux show that patent systems are the result of contending interests at different points in production chains battling over economic surplus. The larger the potential surplus, the more extreme are the efforts of contending parties-now and in the past-to search out, generate, and exploit any and all sources of friction. Patent systems, as human creations, are therefore necessarily ridden with imperfections. This volume explores these shortcomings and explains why, despite all the debate, historically US-style patent systems still dominate all other methods of encouraging inventive activity.

Rethinking Patent Law

Rethinking Patent Law PDF Author: Robin Feldman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064968
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Scientific and technological innovations are forcing the inadequacies of patent law into the spotlight. Robin Feldman explains why patents are causing so much trouble. She urges lawmakers to focus on crafting rules that anticipate future bargaining, not on the impossible task of assigning precise boundaries to rights when an invention is new.

Biotechnology, Patents and Morality

Biotechnology, Patents and Morality PDF Author: Maureen O'Sullivan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429595034
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
This book critiques the decision-making process in Article 53(a) of the European Patent Convention. To date, such decisions have been taken at high levels of expertise without much public involvement. The book eschews traditional solutions, such as those found within legislative, judicial and patent office realms and instead develops a radical blueprint for how these decisions can be put to the public. By examining wide-scale models of participatory democracy and deliberation, this book fills a significant gap in the literature. It will be invaluable for patent lawyers, academics, practitioners and intellectual property and patent officials.

Innovation and Its Discontents

Innovation and Its Discontents PDF Author: Adam B. Jaffe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400837340
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
The United States patent system has become sand rather than lubricant in the wheels of American progress. Such is the premise behind this provocative and timely book by two of the nation's leading experts on patents and economic innovation. Innovation and Its Discontents tells the story of how recent changes in patenting--an institutional process that was created to nurture innovation--have wreaked havoc on innovators, businesses, and economic productivity. Jaffe and Lerner, who have spent the past two decades studying the patent system, show how legal changes initiated in the 1980s converted the system from a stimulator of innovation to a creator of litigation and uncertainty that threatens the innovation process itself. In one telling vignette, Jaffe and Lerner cite a patent litigation campaign brought by a a semi-conductor chip designer that claims control of an entire category of computer memory chips. The firm's claims are based on a modest 15-year old invention, whose scope and influenced were broadened by secretly manipulating an industry-wide cooperative standard-setting body. Such cases are largely the result of two changes in the patent climate, Jaffe and Lerner contend. First, new laws have made it easier for businesses and inventors to secure patents on products of all kinds, and second, the laws have tilted the table to favor patent holders, no matter how tenuous their claims. After analyzing the economic incentives created by the current policies, Jaffe and Lerner suggest a three-pronged solution for restoring the patent system: create incentives to motivate parties who have information about the novelty of a patent; provide multiple levels of patent review; and replace juries with judges and special masters to preside over certain aspects of infringement cases. Well-argued and engagingly written, Innovation and Its Discontents offers a fresh approach for enhancing both the nation's creativity and its economic growth.