Attention: Inventors and startups! Is the patent system confusing to you? Navigating the Patent System will give you more clarity regarding your potential next steps and increase your confidence as you make your patenting decisions. 7 Core Patent Concepts, Drafting the Patent Application and FAQs during patent process are explained.
This essay is the introduction to a book of the same title, forthcoming in summer of 2021 from Oxford University Press. The purpose is to document the ways in which patent systems are products of battles over the economic surplus from innovation. The features of these systems take shape as interests at different points in the production chain seek advantage in any way they can, and consequently, they are riven with imperfections. The interesting historical question is why US-style patent systems with all their imperfections have come to dominate other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The essays in the book suggest that the creation of a tradable but temporary property right facilitates the transfer of technological knowledge and thus fosters a highly productive decentralized ecology of inventors and firms.
In the last two decades, accelerating technological progress, increasing economic globalization and the proliferation of international agreements have created new challenges for intellectual property law. In this collection of articles in honor of Professor Joseph Straus, more than 60 scholars and practitioners from the Americas, Asia and Europe provide legal, economic and policy perspectives on these challenges, with a particular focus on the challenges facing the modern patent system. Among the many topics addressed are the rapid development of specific technical fields such as biotechnology, the relationship of exclusive rights and competition, and the application of territorially limited IP laws in cross-border scenarios.
The patent system is based on "one-patent-per-product" presumption and therefore fails to sustain complex follow-on innovations that contain a number of patents. The book explains that follow-on innovations may be subject to market failures such as hold-ups and excessive royalties. For decades, scholars have debated whether the market problems can be solved with voluntary licensing i.e., open innovation, or with compulsory liability rules. The book concludes that neither approach is sufficient. On the one hand, incentives to engage in open innovation practices involving patents are insufficient. On the other hand, the existing compulsory liability rules in patent and competition law are not tailored to address follow-on innovator's interests. To transcend this problem, the author proposes a compulsory liability rule against the suppression of follow-on innovation, that paradoxically, fosters early-on voluntary licensing between patent holders and follow-on innovators. The book is aimed at patent and competition law scholars and practitioners, patent attorneys, managers, engineers and economists who either engage in open innovation involving patents or conduct research on the topic. It also offers insights to policy and law-makers reviewing the possibilities to foster open innovation initiatives or adapt the scope of patent remedies or employ compulsory licenses for patents.
The Case for Patents offers an affirmative case for the many economic benefits of the patent system and shows how patents provide incentives for invention, innovation, and technological change. The discussion highlights the many contributions of patents to economic growth and development. The Case for Patents helps restore balance to public policy debates by recognizing the important contributions of the patent system.
The first edition of this book was written by Jeffrey Schox for his course "Patent Law and Strategy for Innovators and Entrepreneurs" at Stanford University. After an introduction to intellectual property, it explores the patent system, the requirements for a patent, infringement, and inventorship and ownership issues. The second edition included the America Invents Act ("AIA"), which transformed the U.S. patent system from a "first-to-invent" system to a "first-inventor-to-file" system. The third edition added a glossary and general edits. The fourth edition includes five additional cases: KSR (Supreme Court 2007), Stanford v. Roche (Supreme Court 2011), Prometheus (Supreme Court 2012), Nautilus (Supreme Court 2014), and Limelight (Fed. Cir. 2015).
Reading this book will help you understand how to work the patent system to your advantage, and how to work effectively with the patent attorney who will represent you.
Based on economic knowledge and logical reasoning, this book proposes a solution to economic recessions and offers a route for societal change to end capitalism. The author starts with a brief review of the history of economics, and then questions and rejects the trend of recent decades that has seen econometrics replace economic theory. By reviewing the different schools of economic thought and by examining the limitations of existing theories to business cycles and economic growth, the author forms a new theory to explain cyclic economic growth. According to this theory, economic recessions result from innovation scarcity, which in turn results from the flawed design of the patent system. The author suggests a new design for the patent system and envisions that the new design would bring about large economic and societal changes. Under this new patent system, the synergy of the patent and capital markets would ensure that economic recessions could be avoided and that the economy would grow at the highest speed.