Who's Patenting What? An Empirical Exploration of Patent Prosecution
Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 53, p. 2099, 2000
UC Berkeley, Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 19
University of Texas Public Law & Legal Theory, Research Paper No. 010
81 Pages Posted: 13 Jun 2000
Abstract
We have studied a large, random sample of U.S. patents issued between 1996 and 1998. We collected a variety of information about these patents, including area of technology, national origin, the number of inventors, nature and size of the owning entity, the number and type of prior art references, and the time spent in prosecution. We seek to establish relationships between a number of variables in issued patents-such as number of inventors, numbers and types of references to the prior art, numbers and types of claims, and length of time between application and issuance-and a number of defined areas of technology. We identify the countries in which particular inventions originated--almost one-half of all issued U.S. patents cover inventions originating in other countries--and test for relationships between the above variables and countries of origin. We also evaluate relationships between countries of origin and areas of technology. The conclusions are somewhat surprising, and point to a patent system that is far from unitary in the way it treats different inventors and different inventions.
JEL Classification: K00, K10, K11, K40, L21, O31, O32, O34, O35
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
An Empirical Look at Software Patents
By James E. Bessen and Robert M. Hunt
-
The U.S. Patent System in Transition: Policy Innovation and the Innovation Process
-
Don't Fence Me in: Fragmented Markets for Technology and the Patent Acquisition Strategies of Firms
-
By Ashish Arora, Marco Ceccagnoli, ...
-
The Private Value of Software Patents
By Bronwyn H. Hall and Megan Macgarvie
-
Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry
By Mark A. Lemley and Julie E. Cohen
-
Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry
By Mark A. Lemley and Julie E. Cohen
-
By Alfonso Gambardella, Dietmar Harhoff, ...