Exploring the Tail of Patented Invention Value Distributions

We explore the tail of patented invention value distributions by using value estimates obtained directly from patent holders. The paper focuses on those full-term German patents of the application year 1977 which were held by West German and U.S. residents. The most valuable patents in our data account for a large fraction of the cumulative value over all observations. Several tests are conducted to pin down more precisely the nature of the high-value tail distribution. Among the Pareto, Singh-Maddala and log normal distributions, the log normal appears to provide the best fit to our patented invention value data. --Patents,Skew Distributions

Intellectual Capital and Revitalizing Manufacturing

In December 2009, the White House released a paper outlining their manufacturing policy, A Framework for Revitalizing American Manufacturing. The Framework makes an excellent case that the federal government has a strong role to play in reinvigorating this important sector of the U.S. economy. It outlines the challenges facing manufacturing while describing the opportunities in new product areas. However, the ongoing transformation in manufacturing to a knowledge-intensive activity will require attention to all the inputs to the production process -- technology, worker skills, and organizational structures. The Framework recognizes that the nature of the economy has changed and implicitly accepts this basic premise. "Intellectual capital, such as patents from research and development as well as managerial know-how," the document states, "is a vital component in determining costs, growth rates and the creation of new industries." But while patents and managerial know-how are important components, a successful manufacturing framework must embrace the full range of intellectual capital and intangible assets. This Policy Brief makes a number of recommendations to directly incorporate intellectual capital into a manufacturing strategy and best position the United States for accelerated job, productivity, and economic growth in the coming year

Upstream without a Paddle: Gene Patenting and the Protection of the Infostructure

The U.S. patent system, designed to protect rights to specific, marketable gadgets, has increasingly over the past few decades granted patents on comparatively abstract and amorphous ideas that stretch the system beyond recognition. Overly broad patents, and patents too far upstream from the marketplace, I argue, undermine the patent regime, hamper innovation, and prove exceedingly difficult to adjudicate. Using a series of conceptual and historical analogies, I attempt to assess the patenting of genes and other broad, upstream patents from a public policy context, emphasizing, as many are coming to realize, that things work best in the knowledge-based economy when what I describe as the infostructure —those seminal information assets needed by all players in a given high-tech sector to compete—are pooled and shared

Upstream without a Paddle: Gene Patenting and the Protection of the Infostructure

The U.S. patent system, designed to protect rights to specific, marketable gadgets, has increasingly over the past few decades granted patents on comparatively abstract and amorphous ideas that stretch the system beyond recognition. Overly broad patents, and patents too far upstream from the marketplace, I argue, undermine the patent regime, hamper innovation, and prove exceedingly difficult to adjudicate. Using a series of conceptual and historical analogies, I attempt to assess the patenting of genes and other broad, upstream patents from a public policy context, emphasizing, as many are coming to realize, that things work best in the knowledge-based economy when what I describe as the infostructure —those seminal information assets needed by all players in a given high-tech sector to compete—are pooled and shared

Exploring the Tail of Patented Invention Value Distributions

We explore the tail of patented invention value distributions by using value estimates obtained directly from patent holders. The paper focuses on those full-term German patents of the application year 1977 which were held by West German and U.S. residents. The most valuable patents in our data account for a large fraction of the cumulative value over all observations. Several tests are conducted to pin down more precisely the nature of the high-value tail distribution. Among the Pareto, Singh-Maddala and log normal distributions, the log normal appears to provide the best fit to our patented invention value data

Three real-world datasets and neural computational models for classification tasks in patent landscaping

Patent Landscaping, one of the central tasks of intellectual property management, includes selecting and grouping patents according to user-defined technical or application-oriented criteria. While recent transformer-based models have been shown to be effective for classifying patents into taxonomies such as CPC or IPC, there is yet little research on how to support real-world Patent Landscape Studies (PLSs) using natural language processing methods. With this paper, we release three labeled datasets for PLS-oriented classification tasks covering two diverse domains. We provide a qualitative analysis and report detailed corpus statistics.Most research on neural models for patents has been restricted to leveraging titles and abstracts. We compare strong neural and non-neural baselines, proposing a novel model that takes into account textual information from the patents’ full texts as well as embeddings created based on the patents’ CPC labels. We find that for PLS-oriented classification tasks, going beyond title and abstract is crucial, CPC labels are an effective source of information, and combining all features yields the best results

Innovation with and without patents

A long-standing discussion is to what extent patents can be used to monitor trends in innovation activity. This study quantifies the amount and quality of information about actual innovation contained in the patent system, based on 4,460 Swedish innovations (1970-2015) that have been matched to international patents. The results show that most innovations were not patented and that among those that were, 43.9% of all innovations, only a fraction can be identified with patent quality data. The best-performing models identify 17% of all information about innovations, equivalent to an information loss of at least 83%. Econometric tests also show that the fraction of innovations responding to strengthened patent laws during the period were on average 8% percent. The overlap between the patent and innovation systems is hence more modest than often assumed. This accentuates the need to, alongside patents, develop versatile approaches in order to induce and monitor various aspects of innovation

DNA Patenting and Access to Healthcare: Achieving the Balance among Competing Interests

Increasing evidence suggests that the biotechnology industry\u27s interest in generating revenue and the public\u27s desire to obtain the best healthcare may be at odds. The patenting of genetic information is at the core of this debate. Most, if not all, of the products of the biotech industry\u27s research are patentable. Historically, patents have been justified on the grounds that they are needed to create an incentive for researchers and companies to invest time and money in projects that have uncertain outcomes. In the biotechnology arena, patents do not simply encourage innovation and allow innovators to recoup their costs. Patents can also limit the public\u27s access to valuable information that could benefit individuals and society. This Note argues that current patent laws are not socially beneficial when applied to biotechnology products

Securing Patent Law

A vigorous conversation about intellectual property rights and national security has largely focused on the defense role of those rights, as tools for responding to acts of foreign infringement. But intellectual property, and patents in particular, also play an arguably more important offense role. Foreign competitor nations can obtain and assert U.S. patents against U.S. firms and creators. Use of patents as an offense strategy can be strategically coordinated to stymie domestic innovation and technological progress. This Essay considers current and possible future practices of patent exploitation in this offense setting, with a particular focus on China given the nature of the current policy conversation. To respond to this use of patents as an offense tool, the best approach takes a page from cybersecurity. Patent law cannot simply exclude foreign adversaries, and so the law must be rendered secure and resilient to all potential users, foreign or domestic. Procedures for patent examination and verification, leadership in adjudication fairness, importation of competition principles into patent doctrine, and a whole-of-government approach can help to ensure that patent law is secure from exploitative abuses