Patent law is crucial to encourage technological innovation. But as the patent system currently stands, diverse industries from pharmaceuticals to software to semiconductors are all governed by the same rules even though they innovate very differently. The result is a crisis in the patent...

Transparency has become one of the primary themes in health care reform efforts in the United States and across the world. In the face of exorbitant drug prices, high levels of patient cost-sharing, and pharmaceutical expenditures that consume a growing proportion of public sector budgets, much...

Legal regimes in the United States generally conceptualize obligations as attaching along one of two pathways: through the entity or the individual. Although these dual conceptualizations made sense in an ordinary pre-modern world, they no longer capture the financial system landscape, now that...

Patent law has tried to find a middle ground between a vision of invention as a mental act and a competing vision that focuses on the actual building of a working product. The definition of invention in the 1952 Patent Act incorporates both conception and reduction to practice, sometimes...

In this comprehensive new study, we evaluate all substantive decisions rendered by any court in every patent case filed in 2008 and 2009 — decisions made between 2009 and 2013. We assess the outcome of litigation by technology and industry. We relate the outcomes of those cases to a host of...

In Silicon Valley, the most important thing to think about when starting a company is how you're going to end it. The venture capital funding model that dominates the tech industry is focused on the “exit strategy” — the ways funders and founders can cash out their investment. While in...

Software patents have received a great deal of attention in the academic literature. Unfortunately, most of that attention has been devoted to the problem of whether software is or should be patentable subject matter. With roughly 40,000 software patents already issued, and the Federal Circuit...

The overwhelming majority of intellectual property lawsuits settle before trial. These settlements involve agreements between the patentee and the accused infringer, parties who are often competitors before the lawsuit. Because these competitors may agree to stop competing, to regulate the price...