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Introduction
Pages 1-16

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From page 1...
... The establishment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (1982) , which consolidated all appeals from patent case decisions of federal district courts in a single specialized court, led to a sharp increase in plaintiff success rates in patent infringement law suits.
From page 2...
... The fifth and sixth chapters consider the growth in patent litigation, which may itself be a function of changes in the quality of contested patents. The final three chapters explore controversies associated with the extension of patents into new domains of technology, including biomedicine, software, and business methods.
From page 3...
... such mutual dependence commonly spawns extensive cross-licensing. In these cases the kind of breakdown hypothesized by Heller and Eisenberg does not often occur, but the need for patents as bargaining chips to arrive at satisfactory cross-licensing agreements may stimulate expensive patent portfolio races among industry incumbents.
From page 4...
... Although sharing many of the limitations discussed above, these contributions advance our understanding of the determinants and social welfare implications of patent quality, litigation, and the extension of patenting into new technological domains some of them in novel ways. PATENT QUALITY Over the past decade the quality of issued patents has come under attack.
From page 5...
... attempted to estimate a patent office "production function" and concluded that the number of patent examiners is the major determinant of the number of patents issued, these studies are the first to examine the impact of characteristics of the patent examination process and the examiners themselves on different indices of patent quality. This is an avenue of research that needs to be pursued vigorously if we are to have even a modest research basis for making informed judgments about how USPTO organization, management, and resources affect the quality and level of its output.
From page 6...
... They find that neither the length of experience of examiners, measured either in years or cumulative number of patents issued, or examiner workload, represented by the count of issued patents in the three months prior to issue date of a given patent, appears to have any impact on whether an issued patent is judged valid by the CAFC. If the result means that fewer examination hours per patent, corresponding to a higher workload, has no impact on measures of patent quality, then we have a finding contrary to King's, described above.
From page 7...
... Further assuming that oppositions are on average resolved more quickly and inexpensively than lawsuits, Levin and Levin show that an opposition procedure can offer significant social welfare advantages over the current reliance on litigation to resolve issues of patent validity, especially in newly patented technologies where patent quality is most uncertain. Graham and colleagues are unable to confirm the Levins' prediction that the use of opposition should substitute for subsequent litigation over validity if the process is speedier and cheaper.
From page 8...
... Does the European opposition process tend to select for close scrutiny prospectively valuable patents? Consistent with Harhoff and colleagues' findings (1999, 2002)
From page 9...
... First they show that litigation rates defined as decisions to file a suit normalized by numbers of patents vary substantially across technology fields and that, once disaggregated in that way, litigation rates have not changed over the two decades of rapid growth in patent law suits. In other words, litigation has simply kept pace with patenting.
From page 10...
... Barriers to becoming an integrated semiconductor manufacturer are no doubt very high, more as a consequence of the huge capital requirements of production than of incumbents' patent portfolios. But Ziedonis suggests that since the 1980s patent protection has underpinned the entry and growth of fabless chip design firms, an important component of the industry.
From page 11...
... Signature Financial Group, the same court rejected arguments against patents on "methods of doing business" and appeared to dispense with virtually all limitations on software-related subject matter. The extensions of patents to biotechnology, software, and business methods have aroused controversy on a variety of grounds the ethical implications of patenting life forms, especially human genetic material, the alleged burden on research and product development of patents on upstream research tools and foundational discoveries, and the proximity of some software and business method developments and DNA discoveries to ideas and information theoretically outside the scope of the patent system.
From page 12...
... Both the chapter by Graham and Mowery and the chapter by Allison and Tiller attempt to address the controversial question of patent quality in software generally and business methods in particular. Graham and Mowery use a relative measure of the "importance" of software patents the forward citations to their sample of the patents obtained by large packaged-software firms relative to citations to all software patents for the technology areas that they examine.
From page 13...
... Furthermore, since the passage in 1980 of the Bayh-Dole Amendment, encouraging nonprofit research institutions and small businesses to acquire title to inventions developed with public support, many research universities, the locus of fundamental upstream discoveries, have been patenting and licensing more aggressively. Walsh and colleagues do not find, however, that these developments are yet impeding the development of drugs or other therapies in a significant way.
From page 14...
... An exception to this general finding involves cases where the intellectual property required for follow-on research is the same intellectual property associated with diagnostic tests for genetic predisposition to particular diseases. Walsh and colleagues also suggest that restricted access to upstream discoveries could substantially impede subsequent research and development for particular disease categories and therapies in the future and therefore recommend careful monitoring.
From page 15...
... Patent Of fice." Federal Circuit Bar Journal 11(1)
From page 16...
... 2nd Edn. Boston, MA: Harvard University, Graduate School of Business Administration.


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