2022/34 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
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Death squad or quality improvement? The impact of introducing post-grant review on U.S. patent quality |
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Arianna Martinelli and Julia Mazzei |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
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Patent opposition; patent quality; policy evaluation; patent scope.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
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K41, L24, O31, O32, O33, O34
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
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Increasing evidence indicates that a large share of granted patents are ''undeserved'' because
they do not meet the criteria of novelty or non-obviousness. In recent decades, many jurisdictions
introduced patent reforms to avoid weak patent applications and improve legal patent
quality. In particular, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), enacted into law in 2011,
introduced the post-grant validity challenge at the United States Patents and Trademarks
Office (USPTO). This procedure allows any third party to question granted patents,
possibly leading to patent revocation or scope reduction. This paper aims to provide evidence of
the impact of such policy change on the legal quality of the patent system. To identify the
policy effect we exploit the fact that the same invention is patented in different legislation
and that not all of them have post-grant review procedures. In particular, we compare the
same patent filed at the USPTO and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). In
this setting, we apply standard Diff-in-Diff analysis to estimate the effect of the post-grant
validity challenge on the patent scope. Our results indicate that the AIA reform contributed
to a reduction of U.S. patent scope in the last decade, indeed increasing the legal quality of
the patent system.
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