How can we allow patent examiners to effectively distinguish between patentable and unpatentable inventions, without slowing the process to a crawl or wasting a bunch of money? This essay reviews the recent literature and considers a number of proposals and their limitations. It concludes that...

Patentees overwhelmingly lose their cases, despite a seeming host of procedural advantages. The same is not true of other IP plaintiffs. Why? In this article, I suggest that the explanation lies in the "fractioning" of patent law into smaller and smaller issues. Claim construction after Markman...

How can we fix the PTO, allowing examiners to effectively distinguish between patentable and unpatentable inventions, without slowing the process to a crawl or wasting a bunch of money? This essay reviews the recent literature and considers a number of proposals and their problems. It concludes...

More than 2.5 million United States patents have been issued in the last twenty years. While these patents are spread across all industries, a large percentage are concentrated in the information technology (IT) industries, and others in biotechnology. The prevalence of patents in these...

Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policy impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...

Proposed Uniform Commercial Code article 2B, which will govern transactions in information, will remake the law of intellectual property licensing in a radical way. But federal and state intellectual property policies impose significant limits on the ability of states to change these rules by...

While the theory of the patent system is premised on the idea that patents will be used to exclude competitors, only a tiny fraction of patents are ever enforced. Legal and economic scholars have theorized as to how to identify valuable patents based on their individual characteristics. In this...