Over the past two decades, academics and policy makers in the IP/patent space have focused on three specific developments: elimination of presumptive injunctive relief for victorious patent enforcers in eBay Inc., creation of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), and restriction of software’s eligibility for patent protection in the Alice Corp. decision. Despite general agreement on the importance of these three patent system changes, their individual and collective impact on innovation (construed in terms of firms’ patent filings and R&D investments) remains both contested and understudied.
A recent paper by Christian Helmers (Santa Clara—business) and Brian Love (Santa Clara), Patent Law Reform and Innovation: An Empirical Assessment of the Last 20 Years, jumps into this empirical void and seeks to assess these three reforms’ impact on innovation in the U.S. To do so, the paper constructs firm-level innovation measures and of exposure to each reform and submits them to various Dif-in-Dif specifications that compare relatively exposed and relatively unexposed firms. The paper finds that “Overall, our results suggest that these three reforms had a positive effect on innovation as measured by patent filings and R&D investment.” More detailed findings are described in the excerpted abstract.
“... We find: a positive association between eBay and R&D spending by firms that were relatively more exposed to patent litigation prior to the Court’s decision; a positive association between the introduction of PTAB proceedings and both R&D expenditures and patent filings by firms that innovate in tech classes where PTAB has been most active; and a positive association between Alice and both R&D spending by software firms and patenting by firms that held relatively more software patents prior to the Court’s opinion.”
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