Software patents: a replication study

Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Open Collaboration Pub Date : 2015-08-19 DOI:10.1145/2788993.2789833

Germán Poo-Caamaño, D. Germán

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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Previous research has documented the legal and economic aspects of software patents. To study the evolution in the granting of software patents we reproduced and extended part of the empirical study on software patents conducted by Bessen and Hunt. The original study established a criteria to identify software patents, and provided a look at the evolution of patents granted until 2002. We present a simple approach to retrieve patents from the full text database provided by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which is freely accessible. We also present the evolution of software patents since the original study, and which we also present separated by major technological firms. Our research shows a continuous increase in the number of software patents granted higher, both in number of patents granted (in absolute numbers) and in proportion of overall patents (in relative terms). The relevance of studying the evolution of software patents relies in the challenges to find prior-art, either for practitioners looking for patenting as well as for examiners evaluating granting a new patent.

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软件专利:一项复制研究

以前的研究记录了软件专利的法律和经济方面。为了研究软件专利授予的演变，我们复制并扩展了Bessen和Hunt对软件专利的部分实证研究。最初的研究建立了识别软件专利的标准，并提供了直到2002年授予的专利的演变情况。我们提出了一种从美国专利商标局(USPTO)提供的全文数据库中检索专利的简单方法，该数据库是免费访问的。我们还展示了自最初研究以来软件专利的演变，并且我们还展示了主要技术公司之间的分离。我们的研究表明，软件专利的授权数量在不断增加，无论是授权的专利数量(绝对数量)还是总专利的比例(相对而言)。研究软件专利演变的相关性依赖于寻找现有技术的挑战，无论是对于寻找专利的实践者还是评估授予新专利的审查员来说。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Open Collaboration

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