http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress Research and policy newsletter Wed, 27 May 2009 10:50:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=110 The US Courts have released the number of patent lawsuits filed in fiscal 2007. It is 2,896, up just 2% from the year before. Patent lawsuit filings appear to have hit a plateau. http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=109 What happens when you give out lots of property rights, but nobody exactly knows what those rights cover? Yes, that might describe software/business-method patents and the result is costly litigation, disputes and a net disincentive for innovation. But that also describes recent markets in collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=108 Mike Masnick at Techdirt takes issue ("Why Treating Patents As Property Is A Bad Idea") with the argument that patents should be evaluated as a property system, an argument that Mike Meurer and I make in our book, Patent Failure. Of course, Mike and I do not argue that this ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=107 The government of Australia is considering overhauling patent laws, after a major report found that the ease with which patents were granted in Australia was hampering innovation. The report, Venturous Australia—Building Strength in Innovation, by a government review panel concluded ...in new areas of patenting such as software and business methods, ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=106 There has been a debate among legal scholars about whether patents were seen by the framers of the US Constitution as "property" or, as Thomas Jefferson charged, a monopoly "privilege." For instance, Adam Mossoff has argued that the case law of the early nineteenth century shows that judges treated ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=105 We (Bessen and Meurer) received a nice note from Judge Plager letting us know that he cited our book, Patent Failure, in his recent speech where he called for rethinking patent law by returning to its origins in property law. Judge Plager writes that as a former law professor ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=104 A Time to Rethink Patents as property was also front and center in the thoughts of one judge on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the main appellate court for patent disputes in the US. Senior Judge S. Jay Plager, speaking at a symposium at George Mason University, called ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=103 The idea that patents can be analyzed as a property system—both regarding its strengths and its weaknesses—seems to be gaining currency in influential circles. Last week in the Wall Street Journal, L. Gordon Crovitz writes "...in the case of patents, poorly defined property rights for inventions are leading even the biggest ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=102 Andreas Panagopoulos sent a brief note on a theoretical paper on startups and innovation. In this model, the startup's patents add value to an incumbent's patent portfolio when the incumbent acquires the startup. There is a trade-off between the incumbent's patents deterring entry and the acquisition prospects increasing startup value. ... http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=101