Hypothetical Project Proposal
If I was able to take the second module of the course, I would have liked to examine the the following issue affecting the patent industry.
Background:
A key issue affecting the technology industry is the role of patents. Parents are key in protecting new research, commercializing new technologies, and giving firms space to gain reward based on their research. Because of the importance of patents, and the supremacy of first filing in the patent process, there is often a race to patent forward looking ideas in order to capitalize on new ideas.
Given the volume of ideas presented, the US Patent and Trademark Office will sometimes grant patents for already patented technologies. An increasing problem facing the industry is the role of so called "patent trolls", overly broad patents. Patent trolls demand payment from users who utilize that technology, and because of the cost of litigation for smaller players, many often give into patent troll demands. Whether patent trolls, and other players, acquire or make duplicate filings are filed because of a lack of patent research, willful exploitation of the US Patent and Trademark Office's lack of capacity to closely compare new and old patents, or any other reason, the connections on how frequent offenders approach topics and patents would be useful in beginning to characterize these players, and inform policy makers and technology firms on how to approach these players.
Question:
On a sample of US patent data of duplicate patents, are there any clear connections between delicate filers, and are there any measures we could hypothesize that the USPTO could take to avoid granting duplicate patents.
Methodology :
Using US Patent data, and previous notable cases, a sampling of cases and players would be examined. Using the USPTO's website, and guided by qualitative research about notable disputes, a dataset could be built about patent filings on similar ideas. This project would need significant data manipulation, in terms of vetting the data, cleaning anomalies, and gathering sufficient information.
The data would be in a two mode dataset, with patent filers, and subject of patent. Additional attribute data collected should include year of filing, geographic location of filer, name of filer, and owners of the patents. Likely, a script would be created to gather this type of data.
1 comment:
Good idea, but it needs to be better explained (your mega-sentence about duplicate filers at the end of Background is hard to follow.) Your idea about looking for a network of delicate (assume you mean duplicate) filers is interesting, but it needs to be more carefully thought through. For instance, you mention that you'd probably obtain some two-mode nets, but what kind of analysis would you do? This is the beginning of a potentially-rewarding piece of research which I hope you'll get to do someday.
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