Loser Pays in Patent Examination

Many scholars and practitioners believe there are too many “weak” patents—those that should not have issued but somehow get approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). To the extent they exist, such patents unnecessarily tax real innovation and generate welfare losses for society. Some commentators have focused on the PTO’s failure to exclude weak patents, or the damage caused by these patents in litigation, often by patent trolls. But this scholarly discussion misses the point. The present Article argues that weak patents largely stem from a pricing problem: namely, a patent applicant pays higher patent fees when she succeeds (i.e., receives PTO approval) than when she fails (i.e., is rejected by the PTO). The Article explains why such pricing is precisely backwards, penalizing good patent applications instead of bad ones. It then proposes a novel remedy: import “loser pays” concepts from litigation into patent examination. By forcing unsuccessful patent applicants to pay more, a loser-pays system disincentivizes weak applications and improves application quality. The Article also describes how a loser-pays system could lower patent examiners’ burden and discourage continuation applications, both of which slow down patent examination. In doing so, the Article sketches out a new patent system that is at once more efficient and more effective in weeding out weak patents

New Solvable and Quasi Exactly Solvable Periodic Potentials

Using the formalism of supersymmetric quantum mechanics, we obtain a large number of new analytically solvable one-dimensional periodic potentials and study their properties. More specifically, the supersymmetric partners of the Lame potentials ma(a+1)sn^2(x,m) are computed for integer values a=1,2,3,.... For all cases (except a=1), we show that the partner potential is distinctly different from the original Lame potential, even though they both have the same energy band structure. We also derive and discuss the energy band edges of the associated Lame potentials pm sn^2(x,m)+qm cn^2(x,m)/ dn^2(x,m), which constitute a much richer class of periodic problems. Computation of their supersymmetric partners yields many additional new solvable and quasi exactly solvable periodic potentials.Comment: 24 pages and 10 figure

Hadron Multiplicity in Lepton-Nucleon Interactions

Multi-hadron production in inelastic neutrino-nucleon interactions is investigated within the framework of the quark-gluon string model. The contributions of the planar (one-Reggeon exchange) and cylindrical (one-Pomeron exchange) graphs to different observables is computed using a Monte Carlo program for the generation of hadrons produced from the decay of colorless quark-antiquark strings. The suggested approach results in a satisfactory description of the experimental data on $\nu(\bar\nu) N\to\mu^-(\mu^+) h X$ reactions obtained recently at CERN by the NOMAD Collaboration. The data extends over a wide range of initial neutrino energies $E_\nu$ $<$ 200 GeV/c and momentum transfers 1 $<$ Q $<$ 7 GeV/c, well into the region where perturbative QCD calculations are not applicable.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure