Technology is a bundle of inventions, which are increasingly protected by intellectual property rights. Typically, these rights are owned by multiple different entities, operating in different industries and countries. Moreover, once an invention protected by intellectual property right is...

A popular theory is that it may be sufficiently difficult to reach agreement on patent license terms that holdup in development may occur. Early U.S. radio development is widely believed to provide an empirical example of such holdup during 1905-1920, with numerous allegations of an impasse in...

The first sale or patent exhaustion doctrine reflects the limited nature of patents. In Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., the Supreme Court reaffirmed the principle that the authorized sale of a patented item exhausts the patent as to that item. However, in the context of...

In the land of ‘Jugaad’, where everyone is able to find a frugal fix toany problem, innovation is still dismal. Innovation in India is dismal not because of the lack of grey matter, but because India is systemically failing its inventors – firstly, through an education system that focuses...

This paper examines the duty of disclosure in patent law and discusses the potential insufficiency of disclosing a computer program’s functionality in patent applications for certain categories of software – applications working on closed platforms. In Canada, software patents are generally...

This paper presents an easy-to-use measure of patent scope that is grounded both in patent law and in the practices of patent attorneys. We validate our measure by showing both that patent attorneys' subjective assessments of scope agree with our estimates, and that the behaviour of patenters is...

Intellectual property is traditionally split into three main segments that of copyright, patents and trademarks. In theory, each category of intellectual creations should belong in only one segment of the system and only to the extent authorized by relevant statutory provisions or judicial...

The Supreme Court in Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. reaffirmed the principle that the authorized sale of a patented item exhausts patent protection as to that particular item. However, it is unclear how the patent exhaustion/first sale doctrine should apply in the context of...

This paper, commissioned for the now defunct UK Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, looks at some aspects of UK patent law and asks whether some of the activities it rewards deserve the protection they get. The argument is that patent law should more precisely match and reward...