One of the underlying justifications of the patent system is to encourage dissemination of scientific knowledge and promote innovation. Yet, the patent system is not a green card to innovation. Indeed, given our progress in science and the increasing rate of technological developments it is...

In their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

This article describes the processes involving the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (PTO’s) implementation of administrative patent levers related to business methods. Administrative patent levers are conceptualized in this article as rules that represent a coordinated policy at...

Recently there has been an explosion of patent litigation in the high-tech sector as companies buy up patent portfolios and use them to force settlement agreements from competitors. This has led to an environment in which “patent trolling” is prevalent, and smaller players are pushed out of...

This article encompasses what are the main interests of stem cell research and what are the hopes from them. Further, it recites the moral and legal status of the Human stem cell in different jurisdictions. Furthermore, it furnishes glimpse about regulation of embryo research and embryonic stem...

Section 292 of the Patent Act forbids the false marking of unpatented or infringing articles with the type of marks usually used by patentees to provide public notice of their patented inventions. Prior to the recent enactment of patent reform, the statute provided a rare qui tam enforcement...

Switzerland is about to implement a completely new patent litigation system, following the establishment of a new specialized federal patent trial court and the replacement of twenty-six cantonal codes of civil procedure with a single uniform federal code of civil procedure. This article...

The Bayh-Dole Act allows universities to commercialize their research. University laboratories therefore have two sources of funds: direct grants from the government and funds from commercialization. In addition to giving direct subsidies to university laboratories, the government also...

Patent pools allow competing firms to combine their patents and license them as a package to outside firms. Regulators today favor pools that license their patents freely to outside firms, making it difficult to observe the unconstrained licensing strategies of patent pools. This paper takes...

Patent pools, which combine complementary patents of competing firms, are expected to increase overall welfare – but potentially discourage innovation in substitutes for the pool technology. This paper exploits a new historical data set on changes in patenting and firm entry for a clearly...