Why Weak Patents? Rational Ignorance or Pro-'Customer' Tilt?

Zhen Lei, Brian D. Wright
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引用次数: 21

Abstract

The issuance of weak patents is widely viewed as a fundamental problem in the current US patent system. Reasons that have been offered for the granting of weak patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) include examiners’ “rational ignorance” of the patentability of applications and pro-“customer” rules and institutions that create incentives for examiners to grant patents of dubious validity to their “customers”- applicants. In this paper, we study whether US examiners’ behavior in prior art search betrays their assessment of applications’ patentability. For a sample of US patents for which applications were also filed at the European Patent Office (EPO), we construct a measure of the fraction of prior art that is missed by US examiners. We find that this measure significantly explains the probability of receiving a patent at the EPO. The results are robust to different empirical specifications. US examiners’ prior art searches indicate that they are, on average, not “rationally ignorant”. On the contrary, they identify and dedicate more search effort to those applications that seem more problematic, because they bear the burden of proof of non-patentability. Our study offers empirical evidence that a systematic problem of weak patents likely exists, and suggests that the problem may be more strongly attributable to the pro-applicant rules and policies than to examiners’ ignorance. The current prevalence of weak patents does not appear to be caused at the margin by lack of resources at the USPTO.
为什么是弱专利?理性无知还是偏向“客户”?
人们普遍认为,弱专利的发放是当前美国专利制度的一个根本问题。美国专利商标局(USPTO)授予薄弱专利的理由包括:审查员对申请的可专利性“理性无知”,以及有利于“客户”的规则和制度,这些规则和制度激励审查员向其“客户”——申请人——授予有效性可疑的专利。在本文中,我们研究了美国审查员在现有技术检索中的行为是否背叛了他们对申请可专利性的评估。对于在欧洲专利局(EPO)也提交了申请的美国专利样本,我们构建了一个衡量美国审查员错过的现有技术比例的指标。我们发现,这一措施显著地解释了在EPO获得专利的概率。结果对不同的经验规范具有鲁棒性。美国审查员对现有技术的搜索表明,平均而言,他们并非“理性无知”。相反,他们识别并将更多的搜索精力投入到那些看起来更有问题的应用程序上,因为他们承担了证明不可专利性的责任。我们的研究提供了经验证据,表明弱专利的系统性问题可能存在,并表明这一问题可能更多地归因于有利于申请人的规则和政策,而不是审查员的无知。目前普遍存在的弱专利似乎并不是由于USPTO缺乏资源而造成的。
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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