Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry

Cohen, Julie E.; Lemley, Mark A.

doi:10.2307/3481172

Cited by 130 publications

(52 citation statements)

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“…Rather, the court has found high-level functional description sufficient to satisfy both the enablement and best mode doctrines." See also Cohen and Lemley (2001) on the different treatment of software patents.…”

Section: A Changing Legal Treatment and Strategic Patenting Industriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Look at Software Patents

Bessen

Hunt

2007

Economics Manag Strategy

265

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Abstract:U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequately explained by changes in R&D investments, employment of computer programmers, or productivity growth. The residual increase in patent propensity is consistent with a sizeable rise in the cost effectiveness of software patents during the 1990s. We find evidence that software patents substitute for R&D at the firm level; they are associated with lower R&D intensity. This result occurs primarily in industries known for strategic patenting and is difficult to reconcile with the traditional incentive theory of patents.

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Section: A Changing Legal Treatment and Strategic Patenting Industriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Look at Software Patents

Bessen

Hunt

2007

Economics Manag Strategy

265

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“…Several authors have reported court decisions of validity of patents covering inventions previously non patentable, like biotechnologies, software and business methods (Cohen and Lemley, 2001;Gallini, 2002;Bessen and Hunt, 2004;Hall, 2003;Graham and Mowery, 2003 (Lerner and Tirole, 2002a). However, the future sustainability of both models and the effects on the rate of patenting or increasing disclosure is still unclear.…”

Section: Recent Trends In Intellectual Property Protection: Institutimentioning

confidence: 99%

Intellectual Property Rights and Market Dynamics

Césaroni¹,

Giuri²

2006

International Handbook on Industrial Policy

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“…Nonetheless, if we focus on traded patents, we see only very minor differences in citations across the three ownership types (this is particularly important because traded patents are key for the identification of the effect of trade in our fixed effects regressions). 19 Table 2 also examines the differences in the likelihood of trade and litigation. The …”

Section: Patent Trade Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Trading and Enforcing Patent Rights

Galasso¹,

Schankerman²,

Serrano³

2011

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We would like to thank two anonymous referees and the Editor for very constructive comments on an earlier version of the paper. We are also grateful to Victor Aguirregabiria, Ashish Arora, Pierre Azoulay, Christian Catalini, Dietmar Harhoff, Nico Lacetera, Josh Lerner, Megan MacGarvie, Matt Mitchell, Jeff Thurk, Dan Trefler and Heidi Williams for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, and to Grid Thoma for helping with the matching algorithm. We also thank seminar and conference participants at Berkeley, Duke, Georgia Tech, Kellogg, Carlos III University Madrid, Max Planck Institute, Pompeu Fabra, SUNY Stony Brook, Toulouse, Toronto and the ZEW. Jelena Bozovic and Christina Kim provided excellent research assistance. We are grateful for financial support from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.© 2011 by Alberto Galasso, Mark Schankerman, and Carlos J. Serrano. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. ABSTRACTWe study how the market for innovation affects enforcement of patent rights. Conventional wisdom associates the gains from trade with comparative advantage in manufacturing or marketing. We show that these gains imply that patent transactions should increase litigation risk. We identify a new source of gains from trade, comparative advantage in patent enforcement, and show that transactions driven by this motive should reduce litigation. Using data on trade and litigation of individually-owned patents in the U.S., we exploit variation in capital gains tax rates as an instrument to identify the causal effect of trade on litigation. We find that taxes strongly affect patent transactions, and that reallocation of patent rights reduces litigation risk on average, but the impact is heterogeneous. We show that patents with larger potential gains from trade are more likely to change ownership, suggesting that the market for innovation is efficient, and the impact of trade on litigation depends on characteristics of the transactions.

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Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry

Cited by 130 publications

References 0 publications

An Empirical Look at Software Patents

An Empirical Look at Software Patents

Intellectual Property Rights and Market Dynamics

Trading and Enforcing Patent Rights

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