Explore the vast range of titles available.

In light of malpractice risk and increasing workload, it is vital for practitioners to work effectively and efficiently.This manual provides a tool for promoting the quality of application conduct by enhancing mindfulness of the practitioner to procedural options available at any given point during the application protocol.

Strategy scholars have documented in various empirical settings that firms seek and leverage stronger institutions to mitigate hazards and gain competitive advantage. In this paper, we argue that such “institution-seeking” behavior may not be confined to the pursuit of strong institutions: firms may also seek weak institutions to mitigate hazards. Using panel data from the global smartphone industry and recent patent wars among key industry rivals, we examine how smartphone vendors that are not directly involved in patent litigation strategically respond to increased litigation risks in this industry. We find that as patent wars intensify, smartphone vendors not involved in any litigation focus more of their business in markets with weaker intellectual property (IP) protection because of institutional arbitrage opportunities. This strategic response is more pronounced for vendors whose stocks of patents are small and whose home markets have weak-IP systems. Our study is the first to examine the relationship between heterogeneity in national patent systems and firms’ global strategies. It provides a more balanced view of firms’ institution-seeking behavior by documenting how they make strategic use of weaker institutions.

Research summary: Research shows that multimarket contact (MMC) reduces rivalry involving downstream activities. Yet, studies showing that MMC can increase the threat of imitation suggest a need to better understand how MMC affects upstream rivalry over knowledge based resources. In this study, we argue that MMC increases rivalry over knowfaffge-hased resources since the deterrent threat of retaliation that typically leads to mutual forbearance in downstream activities will not be sufficient to restrain firms from protecting their knowledge from imitation in upstream activities. In support of these arguments we find that MMC Increases the likelihood that a firm initiates patent litigation against a rival. This study suggests the relationship between MMC and rivalry may depend on the competitive domain and the type of resources over which firms are competing. Managerial summary: How does market overlap or MMC affect rivalry between two competitors? Prior studies have largely found that an increase in market overlap decreases rivalry in less knowledge-intensive context because of the deterrent threat of retaliation. However, in this paper, we argue that an increase in market overlap may not reduce rivalry in more knowledge-intensive context because of heterogeneity in capabilities to protect knowledge. We find that a firm is more likely to initiate patent litigation against a rival as market overlap increases. Our findings suggest that the incentive to protect value across multiple product markets may surpass the motivation to cooperate with rivals and that managers should have a more nuanced view of how market overlap with competitors affects rivalry in more knowledge-intensive contexts.

This article compares aspects of American and Canadian patent litigation. In the Canadian Supreme Court, patent cases are few and the rate of reversal is significantly below that of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ideological views of Canadian Supreme Court judges have little impact on decisions, which enjoy a high rate of unanimity. Pre-trial injunctions to protect patent holders can rarely be obtained in ordinary patent litigation in Canada, save in pharmaceutical patent litigation involving a separate regulatory regime patterned on the U.S. Hatch-Waxman Act. The heightened \"clear and convincing evidence\" standard of proof recently adopted in the U.S. to displace the presumption of validity of a patent would likely not be adopted in Canada, where the standard of proof would be on a balance of probabilities. Canadian courts regularly look to U.S. patent decisions for guidance on subject matter patentability. Finally, while patenting life forms can go into novel and challenging territory, the Supreme Court of Canada has, like the U.S., allowed patenting of lower life forms and apparently higher non-human life forms too under the Patent Act. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

We compare patent litigation cases across four European jurisdictions—Germany, the UK (England and Wales), France, The Netherlands—using case-level data gathered from cases filed in the four jurisdictions during the period 2000–2008. Overall, we find substantial differences across jurisdictions in terms of caseloads—notably, courts in Germany hear by far the largest number of cases, not only in absolute terms, but also when taking macro-economic indicators into account—and we further find important cross-country variances in terms of case outcomes. Moreover, we show empirically that a considerable number of patents are litigated across multiple European jurisdictions; and further, that in the majority of these cases divergent case outcomes are reached across the different jurisdictions, suggesting that the long-suspected problem of inconsistency of decision-making in European patent litigation is in fact real. Finally, we note that the coming into force of the Unified Patent Court in Europe may, in the long term, help to alleviate this inconsistency problem.

The ‘claim scope’, or the ‘legal boundaries’ defined by patent claims, has been considered crucial for determining a patent’s value and its associated litigation risk. However, no direct claim semantics-based indicators currently exist to quantify patent claim scope, and existing scope measures are primarily indirect, which limits their ability to capture the semantic nuances of claim text. Additionally, the reliance on post-grant features restricts the applicability of existing litigation prediction models to patent drafts. These limitations complicate the patent drafting process, during which claims are formulated without feedback on scope and litigation risk. This often leads to suboptimal claim articulation, resulting in inadequate protection, increased legal vulnerabilities, or reduced patent grant probability. To address this gap, the hyponym tree score (HTS) is proposed as a novel indicator for quantifying claim scope by analysing hyponym counts, sentence structure, and dependency relations within patent claims. Building on this, early-stage litigation risk prediction has been achieved using a new deep learning model, the Multifeature BERT-Powered Fusion for Author-level Patent Litigation Risk Analysis (MAPRA). The MAPRA model restricts its input features to those available at early stages, such as indicators derived from claim text, inventor information, assignee details, and HTS, ensuring applicability to both draft-stage and granted patents. Despite excluding all post-grant or acquired data, MAPRA achieves a superior area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.878, outperforming the most comparable prior study, which reports an AUC of 0.822 using both early-stage and immediate post-grant features. By quantifying claim scope and enabling early-stage litigation risk prediction, this research offers a valuable screening tool for patent drafters, examiners, attorneys, and innovators. It supports informed decision-making during drafting and helps mitigate potential litigation risks. Furthermore, it lays a foundation for future research on claim scope modeling and the development of predictive tools for intellectual property litigation management.

Among the main criticisms currently confronting the US Patent and Trademark Office are concerns about software patents and what role they play in the web of litigation now proceeding in the smart phone industry. We will examine the evidence on the litigation and the treatment by the Patent Office of patents that include software elements. We present specific empirical evidence regarding the examination by the Patent Office of software patents, their validity, and their role in the smart phone wars. More broadly, this article discusses the competing values at work in the patent system and how the system has dealt with disputes that, like the smart phone wars, routinely erupt over time, in fact dating back to the very founding of the United States. The article concludes with an outlook for systematic policymaking within the patent system in the wake of major recent legislative and administrative reforms. Principally, the article highlights how the US Patent Office acts responsibly when it engages constructively with principled criticisms and calls for reform, as it has during the passage and now implementation of the landmark Leahy–Smith America Invents Act of 2011.

Postgrant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring postgrant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are caught up in patent thickets. Using data on opposition to patents at the European Patent Office we show that opposition decreases in fields in which many others profit from patent revocations. Moreover, in fields with a large number of mutually blocking patents, the incidence of opposition is sharply reduced, particularly among large firms and firms that are caught up directly in patent thickets. These findings indicate that postgrant patent review may not constitute an effective correction device for erroneous patent grants in technologies affected by either patent thickets or highly dispersed patent ownership. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation .

A patent system requires novelty and progressiveness so that new patents do not infringe on the rights of prior art. Patent investigation including a prior art search is essential to the process of commercialization of technology. In general, patent investigation has been conducted by experts based on their qualitative judgement. However, the number of patents has increased so fast that it has become difficult to handle the quantitative burdens of the search with a conventional approach. There have been previous studies dealing with patent investigation to find similar technologies. They had limitations as they did not utilize the citation relationship and similarity between patents in a comprehensive way. In addition, they could not properly reflect the sequential citation relationship of patents though this is effective in discovering similar patents. In this study, we propose an efficient methodology to discover similar technologies by comprehensively considering the similarity and citation relationship between patents. In particular, we intended to reflect the citation sequence and indirect citation relationship in the process of searching for similar patents. For this, we introduced the concept of “patents with indirect connections” (PICs) and devised an algorithm to efficiently detect patent pairs having such a relationship. The proposed methodology of this study contributes to preventing patent litigation in advance by discovering patents with such potential risks. It is expected that this method will provide patent applicants with the opportunity to establish appropriate strategies against competitors with similar technologies. In order to examine the practical applicability of the proposed method, Korean patents related to machine learning and deep learning were collected. As a result of the experiment, it was possible to identify 24 pairs of similar patents without a direct citation relationship and derive appropriate counter strategies.

Patent litigation occurs when a company’s product or service violates the scope of another company’s patent rights. When they occur, companies suffer a disruption to the sales of their products and services, thus hindering the sustainability of their business activities. For this reason, companies have established and analyzed wide-ranging strategies to prevent patent litigation. Of those, statistical and machine learning-based quantitative methods using patent big data have several advantages, such as a reduced cost and objective results. Existing quantitative methods analyze patent information and litigation based on the time of data collection. However, the values of patents and their litigation hazards change over time. In addition, the existing methods do not take into account censored data; that is, patents that may result in litigation after the data is collected. In this paper, to solve this problem we propose an integrated survival model that considers censored data and predicts patent litigation hazards over time. The proposed model is a non-parametric survival analysis method based on a random survival forest. It uses pre-trained word2vec and clustering to effectively reflect the technology fields as well as the quantitative information of the patent. The word2vec is a technique for natural language processing and enables the use of patent text information. In order to examine the practicality of the integrated survival model, an experiment is conducted with patent big data related to sensor semiconductors based on AI technology applicable to robotics. In the experiment, it was found that the litigation hazard occurred 150 months after the patent application and increase rapidly from 200 months. Furthermore, the proposed model showed better predictive performance than other survival analysis models. The proposed model could be used by potential defendants to protect their patents.