Property Rights and Patent Litigation in Early Nineteenth-Century America

1995 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Zorina Khan
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Patent System ◽  
Expected Returns ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Early America ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Patent Rights ◽  
Inventive Activity

Economic development depends on the establishment of appropriate institutions, such as a patent system that defends property rights in inventions. Skeptics argue that patents in early America were unenforceable because judges arbitrarily ruled against patentees. I examine 795 patent cases to assess the role of the courts and find that judges protected patent rights because they believed that inventors were motivated by expected returns. Although changes occurred in the 1850s, the courts consistently upheld the view that the patent system fostered economic growth. If inventive activity indeed responded to material incentives, this finding implies that the legal system stimulated technical change by reinforcing the effectiveness of the patent system.The laws of the United States are extremely favorable to the division of property.—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Equal Rights, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Inequality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

While cherishing ideas of equal rights and equality, Americans have simultaneously sought inequality. The Revolution of 1776 committed Americans to the idea of equal rights, but just as fundamentally it dedicated the United States to the protection and increase of individual property and the power to direct it to heirs. Although equal rights and individual property rights have proved compatible with religious and ethnic equality, social and economic inequality, both meritocratic and inherited, have been integral to the American social and political order. Moreover, based on the emerging biologies of race and sex, the idea of equal rights for people of color and for women faced new barriers in nineteenth-century America and beyond into the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Crafting Intellectual Property Rights: Implications for Patent Assertion Entities, Litigation, and Innovation

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Feng ◽  
Xavier Jaravel
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Intellectual Property Rights ◽  
Patent System ◽  
Patent Office ◽  
Patent Value ◽  
Patent Rights ◽  
Rational Ignorance ◽  
Patent Examination

We show that examiner-driven variation in patent rights leads to quantitatively large impacts on several patent outcomes, including patent value, citations, and litigation. Notably, Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) overwhelmingly purchase patents granted by “lenient” examiners. These examiners issue patents that are more likely to be litigated by both PAEs and conventional companies, and that also have higher invalidity rates. PAEs leverage a specific friction in the patent system that stems from lenient examiners and affects litigation more broadly. These patterns indicate that there is much at stake during patent examination, contradicting the influential “rational ignorance” view of the patent office. (JEL K11, K41, O31, O34, O38)

Property Rights in American Economic History

2018 ◽  
pp. 168-194
Author(s):  
Gary Libecap
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equity And Efficiency ◽  
Mineral Rights ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Efficiency Effects

This chapter examines the development of private property rights to natural resources in the United States as a bottom-up or top-down process. Long-term equity and efficiency effects are highlighted. The role of property rights in avoiding the tragedy of the commons is illustrated. The property rights examined are those to farmland, timberland, as well as grazing rights and mineral rights. Each emerged or were constrained in different ways with important long-term economic and social effects in American economic development. The role of the rectangular survey in deliminating rights to surface land to reduce tenure uncertainty and to promote land and capital markets is described in detail.

scholarly journals The Surprising Resilience of the Patent System

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lemley
Keyword(s):  
Patent Law ◽  
Patent System ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Legislative Reform ◽  
System P ◽  
Patent Rights ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
New Business ◽  
Patent Applications

The patent system seems in the midst of truly dramatic change. The lasttwenty years have seen the rise of a new business model – the patent troll– that grew to become a majority of all patent lawsuits. They have seen asignificant expansion in the number of patents granted and a fundamentalchange in the industries in which those patents are filed. They have seenthe passage of the most important legislative reform in the last sixtyyears, a law that reoriented legal challenges to patents away from courtsand toward the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). And they have seenremarkable changes in nearly every important legal doctrine, from patenteligibility to obviousness to infringement to remedies.These changes have prompted alarm in a number of quarters. From the 1990sto the 2000s, as the number of patents and patent troll suits skyrocketed,technology companies and academics worried about the “crisis” in the patentsystem – a crisis of overprotection that might interfere with rather thanpromote innovation. By 2015, as patent reform took effect and the SupremeCourt undid many of the Federal Circuit’s expansions of patent rights, itwas patent owners who were speaking of a crisis in the patent system – acrisis of underprotection that might leave innovators without adequateprotection. Depending on one’s perspective, then, the sky seems to havebeen falling on the patent system for some time.Despite the undeniable significance of these changes in both directions,something curious has happened to the fundamental characteristics of thepatent ecosystem during this period: very little. Whether we look at thenumber of patent applications filed, the number of patents issued, thenumber of lawsuits filed, the patentee win rate in those lawsuits, or themarket for patent licenses, the data show very little evidence that patentowners and challengers are behaving differently because of changes in thelaw. The patent system, then, seems surprisingly resilient to changes inthe law. This is a puzzle. In this article, I document this phenomenon andgive some thought to why the fundamental characteristics of the patentsystem seem resistant to even major changes in patent law and procedure.The results pose some profound questions not only for efforts at patentreform but for the role of the patent system in society as a whole.

Compulsory Licensing of Patents in India

2017 ◽  
pp. 124-134
Author(s):  
Shinu Vig ◽  
Teena Bagga
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Intellectual Property Rights ◽  
Patent System ◽  
Pharmaceutical Companies ◽  
Patent Holder ◽  
Compulsory Licensing ◽  
Patent Rights ◽  
Life Threatening

Compulsory licensing is defined generally as the granting of a license by a government to use a patent without the patent-holder's permission. As applied to international intellectual property rights, it allows governments to grant licenses for patent use in situations where the patent-holder is either not using the patent within the country or is not using it adequately. Most of the drugs for which compulsory licenses have been granted in India are used for treatment of life-threatening diseases. The pharmaceutical companies however object on the ground of violation of their patent rights. This chapter discusses the provisions for compulsory licensing in TRIPs and the India patent system.

Selling Ideas

2020 ◽  
pp. 287-316
Author(s):  
B. Zorina Khan
Keyword(s):  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Market ◽  
International Standards ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Transfer Of Technology ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Patent Rights ◽  
Inventive Activity ◽  
Patented Inventions

An extensive global market in patent rights and patented inventions helped creative men and women to increase their returns from inventive activity. Prominent multinational corporations further depended on portfolios of patents to acquire and maintain their domestic and worldwide competitive advantage. Markets in ideas aided the transfer of technology across the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, Spain, and Japan. Patterns in the sale of patents and foreign patenting were responsive to national differences in incentives, legal rules, and institutions. The results shed light on central debates in economic development, including the net benefits of tailoring patent institutions to individual circumstances, relative to adherence to harmonized international standards.

scholarly journals Scots Law in Post-Revolutionary and Nineteenth-Century America: The Neglected Jurisprudence

1990 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Paul Rogers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Education Philosophy ◽  
American Law ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the role of Scots law in the development of the post-Revolutionary law and legal system of the United States. This neglect stems largely from the fact that Scots law has had little apparent permanent influence on American law. However, during the “formative era of American law” from the Revolution to the Civil War, a notable effort to introduce America to civil law concepts took place. Furthermore, the impact of the Scottish enlightenment on the fledgling United States in higher education, philosophy, and medicine is well documented. Scottish Enlightenment thought arguably had a significant impact on the Declaration of Independence, which was signed by at least two native-born Scots and an American who was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh.

Social Federalism: The Constitutional Position of Nonprofit Corporations in Nineteenth-Century America

1990 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Manufacturing Companies ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Society

The importance of voluntary associations is apparent to all who study the development of American society in the nineteenth century. Observations made by the perceptive nineteenth-century traveler Alexis de Tocqueville have become an obligatory cliché in historical writing on the subject:Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies,… but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

National Socialism and the Technological Culture of the Weimar Republic

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees Gispen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Patent System ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Technological Culture ◽  
Patent Rights ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

At the height of the Cold War in 1962, U.S. Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights, raised the possibility of introducing legislation to “restore the patent system, in at least some measure, to its traditional role of rewarding the inventor, in order the better to carry out the constitutional objective of ‘promoting the progress of science and useful arts.’” The rise of the corporate research establishment, McClellan stated, had caused the employer to interpose “himself between the individual inventor and the patent system, with the former appropriating the patent rights and the latter often being rewarded by nominal monetary grants or other recognition.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document