Galasso & Schankerman: Do Patents Impede Cumulative Innovation?

In their new working paper, Patents and Cumulative Innovation: Causal Evidence from the Courts, economists Alberto Galasso (Toronto School of Management) and Mark Schankerman (London School of Economics) present new evidence on whether patents promote or impede follow-on innovation based on subsequent citations to patents invalidated by the Federal Circuit.

Top 10 New IP Paper Downloads

Here's an updated list of the most downloaded IP papers that were posted on SSRN in the past 60 days:

Liveblogging Posner vs. Epstein at PatCon 3

I'm at PatCon 3 at Chicago-Kent (follow live tweets at #PatCon3), where so far we have heard Judge Linn expressing skepticism about the Supreme Court's role in patent law, a panel of in-house counsel describing their views on the patent system's biggest problems, and a plenary session with Mark Lemley (arguing against jury trials for patent validity), James Malackowski (on IP markets), and David Abrams (on patent value and citations). Below are (very) rough notes on one of the highlights of the day, a debate between Judge Posner and Professor Epstein:

Beyond the Patents-Prizes Debate

Daniel Hemel and I just posted a new draft paper, Beyond the Patents-Prizes Debate, which I'll be presenting on Saturday at PatCon 3 at Chicago-Kent. The article develops a new taxonomy of innovation policies that highlights the overlooked benefits of tax incentives for research activities. We would love feedback and suggestions; feel free to email us at the addresses listed at the top of the PDF. Here is the current abstract:

Classic Design Patent Scholarship

Just in time for Stanford's Design Patents in the Modern World Conference (on Twitter at #designpatents2013), we have a new addition to the Classic Patent Scholarship Project on design patents written by Professor Sarah Burstein (Oklahoma Law). Her scholarship is available here, and she frequently Tweets about design law as @design_law.

It might seem strange to have a list of classic design patent scholarship that consists largely of articles that do not really focus on design patents. But the literature is sparse. And even if it wasn’t, these articles would still be important because they each address issues that we are still debating today—including the fundamental question of how (or if) we should protect designs using intellectual property law.