We offer description and analysis of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Surveythe first comprehensive survey of patenting and entrepreneurship in the United States-summarizing the responses of 1,332 early-stage technology companies founded since 1998. Our results show that entrepreneurs have varied and subtle reasons for using the patent system, many of which diverge from the traditional theory that patents provide an "incentive to invent." Somewhat surprisingly, startup executives report that patents generally provide relatively weak incentives to conduct innovative activities. But while a substantial share of early-stage companies hold no patents, we also find that holding patents is more widespread than previously reported, with patenting patterns and motives being highly industry, technology, and context specific. When early-stage companies patent, they are often seeking competitive advantage, and the associated goals of preventing technology copying, securing financing, and enhancing reputation. We find substantial differences between the health-related sectors (biotechnology and medical devices), in which patents are more commonly used and considered important, and the software and Internet fields, in which patents are reported to be less useful. Startups with venture funding hold more patents regardless of industry, although unlike software companies, venture-backed IT hardware firms show a patenting pattern more similar to that of health-related firms. When choosing not to patent major innovations, early-stage companies often cite to cost considerations, and report substantially higher patenting costs than the
This is a broader definition than has previously been used by courts and commentators, but it captures how the term is used in this Article. "Human-made artifacts" are objects that embody knowledge or know-how previously discovered by other people. Hence, the engineering required to uncover the knowledge is "reverse" engineering. As we shall see, extraction of this knowledge can be costly or cheap, time-consuming or fast, depending on the artifact, and these notions govern the consequences of allowing it to be extracted. The standard legal definition, from Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp., 416 U.S. 470 (1974), is "starting with the known product and working backward to divine the process which aided in its development or manufacture." Id. at 476. Professor Reichman conceives of this knowledge as applied scientific or industrial knowhow. J.
Some economists and privacy advocates have proposed giving individuals property rights in their personal data to promote information privacy in cyberspace. A property rights approach would allow individuals to negotiate with firms about the uses to which they are willing to have personal data put and wouldforce businesses to internalize a higher proportion of the societal costs of personal data processing. However, granting individuals property rights in personal information is unlikely to achieve information privacy goals in part because a key mechanism ofpropery law, namely the general policy favoring free alienability of such rights, would more likely defeat than achieve information privacy goals. Drawing upon certain concepts from the unfair competition-based law of trade secrecy, this article suggests that information privacy lmv needs to impose minimum standards of commercial morality on firms engaged in the processing ofpersonal data and proposes that certain default licensing rules of trade secrecy law may be adapted to protect personal information in cyberspace.
The main purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement but to change consumer expectations about what they are entitled to do with digital content.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.