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Description (through texts, images, models or samples) played a central role in the patent regimes that emerged in the eighteenth century, first in England, later in the United States and in France. Description ensured that the contract—protection in excha ...
Patents have traditionally been used in the history of technology as an indication of the thinking process of the inventors, of the challenges or “reverse salients” they faced, or of the social groups influencing the construction of technology. More recent ...
Inventions of foreign origin are about ten percentage points less likely to be granted a U.S. patent than domestic inventions. An empirical analysis of 1.5 million U.S. patent applications identifies three systematic differences between foreign and domesti ...
In 1791, one year after the first US Patent Act, the French ‘Loi relative aux découvertes utiles’ sought to revolutionize the Ancien Régime’s privileges of invention, turning them into new patents or ‘brevets d’invention’. Not only did the law recast ci-de ...
This thesis investigates the economic effect of patents and the patent system through the lens of patent commercialisation. The thesis is composed of four chapters, where each chapter is an independent scientific paper. In the first chapter, we present a n ...
The United States patent system is unique in that it requires applicants to cite documents they know to be relevant to the examination of their patent applications. Lampe (2012) presents evidence that applicants strategically withhold 21-33% of relevant ci ...
This article provides a long-term view on the sources of knowledge flow between developed and developing nations. It relies on patent data to explore three potential sources: R&D collaboration, technology sourcing, and technology transfer. All three source ...
Governments have strong incentives to allow their inventors to free ride on foreign technologies. They can achieve this result by discriminating against foreigners in the patent system-by refusing to grant foreigners a patent for their inventions. Internat ...
Patent marking is used by patentees to provide a form of notice to the public about the existence of a patent and can increase damages awarded in cases of infringement. Historically, marking is done by listing the associated patents on the product they cov ...
The U.S. government invests more than $50 billion per year in R&D procurement but we know little about the outcomes of these investments. We have traced all the patents arising from government funding since the year 2000. About 1.5 percent of all R&D procu ...