Katherine Stranburg – Nonobviousness and Nerd Culture

A Research manager approach focusing on Socially Optimal Invention levels. This is an interesting piece that merges legal policy choices with economic models.

Brian’s response: The models appear to be useful for providing different perspectives for evaluating the nonobvious patent requirements. Although there at least 10 separate assumptions that need to be made to make this model work. The number of assumptions needed to make the model work may prevent the models from being ultimately useful for making larger policy decisions. I really appreciated that the models include social cost of patents including restricted diffusion of the invention, and higher prices. And am curious to see the final draft of the paper

Joseph Miller – Are Erroneous Patent Denials Better than Erroneous Grants?

Supreme Court prefers false rejections over granting obvious patents while the Federal Circuit had been leaning to the opposite side
Favorite quote: “patent attorney spiritual nihilism”

Brian’s response: His discussion on the cost of Grants and denils looks very interesting. I am curious to see how the draft paper changes with the R&D input stating that the standards change may have little real world impact on how R&D money is spent.

R. Polk Wagner – KRS, The Supreme Court and The Future of Patent Reform

The Technology Industry has dramatically increased there pursuits of patents per research dollar. It is getting tougher to get major legislative change through due to the corporate interest, which leaves judicial reform as the path of least resistance for reforming the patent system. Although reform through the courts is not the long term solution.

Brian’s response: The paper uses statistics in a very useful way to empirically explore court findings.

Robert P. Merges – Commenter

“Reading ones own stuff (writings) make your brain light up like a Christmas tree” (paraphrased)

Robert argues that the patent law code will expand to look more like the copyright code. Specifically the legislative process will be used by cooperate interests to address case based issues expanding the code beyond its current limited focus and moving reform to the judicial as the code expands.

Side note for none patent geeks following the podcast or blog:
PHOSITA = Person having ordinary skills in the art, PHOSITA wiki defition

Final note, from Suzanne Scotchmer:

Nonobviousness: What is evidence?

• Market Environment
• Innovative Environment
• Competing Technologies
• Cost Considerations