The Internet, computing, and telecommunications industries are ripe for a collision between the worlds of intellectual property and standardization. Many technologies in these industries are covered by patents, and some of these patented technologies are essential to standards necessary for...

Intellectual property (IP) law regimes in the United States are designed as tradeoffs between protection for creators (inventors, authors, and the like), and the interests of the consuming public. Reform of the patent system does not ascribe to a general idea of optimality or system efficiency...

In this paper, we present a framework that can process a user query for retrieval of information from documents of different properties across multiple domains, with specific application to patent laws and regulations. The framework has three basic components. The first component is ontology...