"Strategies to Improve Patenting and Enforcement"
IPKat - IP news and fun for everyone: The IPKat thanks Nick Cunningham (Wragge) for sending him this report on the recent AIPPI UK talk, “Strategies to Improve Patenting and Enforcement”, which was prepared by Shauna Garvey (Bristows).
Right: strategies, once the province of the military, are now a matter of immediate concern for the IP community
Nick writes:
“At an AIPPI UK talk hosted by Bristows, Mark Schankerman, Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, spoke to a capacity audience on “Strategies to Improve Patenting and Enforcement: the impact of patent thickets, renewal fees and litigation insurance”. Professor Schankerman, a noted and long-standing commentator on the economics of patents, is a Research Director of the Programme on Productivity, Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, a Research Fellow at CEPR, and a Director at LECG.
The seminar began with an analysis of the rapid increase in the number of patent applications over the past few decades. While this trend might reflect growth in innovation, Professor Schankerman noted concerns that increased patenting could impede rather than incentivise innovative activity. Reasons advanced for this included the creation of patent thickets (where fragmented intellectual property rights require the securing of licence agreements from many patentees, inflating the costs of innovation), a corresponding increase in the cost of enforcing patents, and the problems caused by patent trolls.
Professor Schankerman discussed potential strategies to address these issues, motivated by the basic objectives of maintaining innovation incentives, preserving effective competition among innovators, and using market-based solutions.
Patent screening processes could be divided into two categories: ex ante screening (undertaken by the patent office examiner) and ex post screening. The talk focused on the latter, and in particular on two particular forms of ex post screening, the first being litigation by private parties, and the second, somewhat surprisingly,…