Why Are Patents Considered Necessary for Researchers to Read

Do patents disembalm information that is technically useful to researchers in the same fashion scientific publications are? The Supreme Courtroom has described disclosure equally ane of the main purposes of the patent organizationin many cases. Just near patent scholars argue that researchers don't read patents because (one) patents don't really have useful technical information—they are just confusing legalese; and (2) researchers wouldn't read patents anyway considering they're worried about beingness liable for willful infringement.

I decided to study this issue byconducting my ain survey, since it turns out that we have relatively piffling data nigh how researchers actually apply patents. Most previous surveys predate the set availability of patents online, but even these surveys suggest that patents are more useful than many commentators suggest. For case, a 1994survey of manufacturing firm R&D managers is frequently cited for propositions like that "scientists don't in fact gain much of their cognition from patents, turning instead to other sources." But what it actually found is that most 50% of U.Southward. respondents said patents were "moderately" or "very" of import as a source of information for a recent project, which is less than the 62% who said the same of scientific publications, but which is still a sizable number. (Interestingly, patents were by far the virtually important source of information in Japan!)

I focused my survey on researchers in nanotechnology, partly because that'south the field I did my Ph.D. work in, simply also because it is an emerging field where most of the piece of work is nevertheless being done by basic researchers—which ways there'due south a vibrant scientific literature in add-on to the patent literature, and one might thus look patents to be even less useful than in more practical fields. Yous can observe all the details virtually my 211 respondents and the specific survey questions in my article, Do Patents Disclose Useful Information? , just I'll highlight four primal results:

1. 64% of the respondents have read patents.
2. Of respondents who were reading patents to wait for scientific data (rather than for legal reasons), 60% constitute useful technical information. They said things like:
   • "Patents are a useful source of information on how others accept approached item technical problems and can also assistance you from going down a road that has already been traveled."
   • "Patents offered some plausible views equally to what we were seeing in our own inquiry."
   • "Protocols or recipes for preparing samples or performing experiments are described that are not found in other published literature."
   • "The manner a new engineering science is described is much more reliable and reproducible in a patent than in a scientific newspaper" considering in papers "academic researchers purposely remove essential steps for reproducing data," and then "I trust patents more when I need to effort other people's technologies."
3. Even though patents were useful for many scientists who read them, merely 38% of patent readers thought the patents they read were reproducible.
4. Only iii out of the 211 respondents might be characterized as avoiding patents because of willful infringement concerns.

Some of my former nanotech colleagues and I likewise looked at specific nanotechnology patents, and our findings complement the survey results: nosotros found that there was useful technical information in the patent literature that was not duplicative of the scientific literature, but nosotros besides constitute that many patents did not comprise all the details that nosotros thought would be necessary to reproduce the claimed inventions.

I think these results evidence that the disclosure function of patents is working to at least some extent, at least in nanotech: patents tin exist a useful source of technical information, and willful infringement concerns are not preventing most nanotech researchers from looking at patents. Simply there are still issues with patent disclosure: the result that only 38% of patent readers think those patents are reproducible raises questions about whether disclosure ought to be improved just to run across current legal requirements.

Now, this does non mean that technical disclosures are ajustification for the patent arrangement's costs—I think the reason nosotros take a patent system is to incentivize the creation and commercialization of new inventions. To me, the interesting question is: given that we have a patent arrangement, how much disclosure should we crave? In other words, how much benefit are we getting from patent disclosures, and how does that compare to the costs to innovation incentives and the administrative costs of requiring that disclosure? And could we benefit more by requiring improve disclosures without harming innovation incentives? I think these questions open at least three interesting avenues for farther research:

Offset, whatkind of useful information practice scientists observe in patents, and how does the employ of patent disclosures vary by field? Practise researchers employ patents primarily to build on the patented invention, or are there significant spillover benefits for users non contemplated past the patentee? I plan to expand my survey into boosted fields, including more than industry researchers, and to complement large-scale survey results with more in-depth interviews. I expect results to look very unlike for software developers than for pharmaceutical researchers, but it will be interesting to see how. Perchance areas where disclosure isn't working well can learn something from areas where it is.

Second, how can we measure the benefit of improved disclosure? Ina new working newspaper on patent policy experimentation, I propose that information technology might be possible to make some progress on this using small-scale-calibration experiments. For example, programers could be asked to implement fictitious software patents with varying types of disclosure (eastward.one thousand., as part of an undergrad CS form, or in something likethis experiment with a TopCoder competition), and their programs could be compared based on the time needed to produce a functioning program and the program's quality based on metrics such as runtime.

And 3rd, if we make up one's mind that it is worth improving patent disclosures, how practice we do that? Examiners I've spoken with prefer to focus on prior fine art issues than on enablement, which makes intuitive sense to me: fifty-fifty having a Ph.D. in physics, there are only a tiny number of inventions for which I really would experience comfortable determining whether "undue experimentation" would be required for a PHOSITA to do the claims. Is it possible to make it easier for examiners to accurately evaluate enablement? And are there ways to amend the value of patent disclosures to scientists across better enforcement of current legal requirements?

I don't know the answers to these questions, merely I'd like to effigy them out; my hope is that farther increasing scientists' engagement with the patent literature will benefit both science and patent law. And I welcome suggestions from IPWatchdog readers about any of these inquiry directions!

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Source: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2013/07/18/do-scientists-read-patents/id=43401/

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