Citing empirical evidence that non-practicing entities assert relatively old patents that cover inventions in relatively fast-paced industries, this essay argues that the PTO should increase the number and magnitude of patent renewal ("maintenance") fees in order to hasten the expiration of...

Any discussion of flaws in the United States patent system inevitably turns to the system’s modern villain: non-practicing entities, known more colorfully as patent trolls. For many years, however, discussions about non practicing entities have been long on speculation and short on data. In...

Courts and commentators are sharply divided about how to assess “reverse payment” patent settlements under antitrust law. The essential problem is that a PTO-issued patent provides only a probabilistic indication that courts would hold that the patent is actually valid and infringed, and...

Patent opposition allows third parties, such as competitors, suppliers, or customers of the patentee, to raise arguments and provide evidence of invalidity to the Patent Office, prior to the patent being finally granted. As a procedure, it has two key objectives acknowledged by courts and...

Although standards for the grant of intellectual property rights often take center stage in the literature on intellectual property and development, intellectual property enforcement is largely ignored. This paper seeks to fill this gap, albeit to a limited extent, by focusing on the standards...

This paper explores the issue of apportionment through the determination of the appropriate royalty base in the adjudication of patent damages, or more precisely, FRAND royalties for standard essential patents (SEPs). Through the use of an intellectual value chain (IVC) framework, this paper...

Universities are engines of innovation. To encourage further innovation, the federal government and charitable foundations give universities grants in order to enable university researchers to produce the inventions and discoveries that will continue to fuel our knowledge economy. Among other...

In response to the intensive use of antibiotics since their discovery in the 1930s, bacteria increasingly have evolved resistance to these critical medications. Because of this evolutionary process, antibiotics have an unusual characteristic that gives rise to a negative externality: Current use...

We use machine learning methods to predict which patents end up at court using the population of US patents granted between 2002 and 2005. We analyze the role of the different dimensions of an empirical analysis for the performance of the prediction - the number of observations, the number of...

Patent law is under-theorized in the sense that the predominating incentive-based justifications cannot by themselves adequately explain empirical evidence on patenting gathered by research economists. This article provides an alternative justification for patent law based on private transaction...