Scope Of Claims Research Articles

InstructPatentGPT: training patent language models to follow instructions with human feedback

AbstractIn this research, patent prosecution is conceptualized as a system of reinforcement learning from human feedback. The objective of the system is to increase the likelihood for a language model to generate patent claims that have a higher chance of being granted. To showcase the controllability of the language model, the system learns from granted patents and pre-grant applications with different rewards. The status of “granted” and “pre-grant” are perceived as labeled human feedback implicitly. In addition, specific to patent drafting, the experiments in this research demonstrate the model’s capability to learn from adjusting claim length and inclusion of limiting terms for narrowing claim scope. As proof of concept, the experiments focus on claim ones only and the training data originates from a patent dataset tailored specifically for artificial intelligence. Although the available human feedback in patent prosecution are limited and the quality of generated patent text requires improvement, the experiments following the 3-stage reinforcement learning from human feedback have demonstrated that generative language models are capable of reflecting the human feedback or intent in patent prosecution. To enhance the usability of language models, the implementation in this research utilizes modern techniques that enable execution on a single consumer-grade GPU. The demonstrated proof of concept, which reduces hardware requirements, will prove valuable in the future as more human feedback in patent prosecution become available for broader use, either within patent offices or in the public domain.

Debunking robot rights metaphysically, ethically, and legally

In this work we challenge the argument for robot rights on metaphysical, ethical and legal grounds. Metaphysically, we argue that machines are not the kinds of things that may be denied or granted rights. Building on theories of phenomenology and post-Cartesian approaches to cognitive science, we ground our position in the lived reality of actual humans in an increasingly ubiquitously connected, controlled, digitized, and surveilled society. Ethically, we argue that, given machines’ current and potential harms to the most marginalized in society, limits on (rather than rights for) machines should be at the centre of current AI ethics debate. From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights, a highly controversial concept whose most important effect has been the undermining of worker, consumer, and voter rights by advancing the power of capital to exercise outsized influence on politics and law. The idea of robot rights, we conclude, acts as a smoke screen, allowing theorists and futurists to fantasize about benevolently sentient machines with unalterable needs and desires protected by law. While such fantasies have motivated fascinating fiction and art, once they influence legal theory and practice articulating the scope of rights claims, they threaten to immunize from legal accountability the current AI and robotics that is fuelling surveillance capitalism, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching injustice and human suffering.

The Humanization of War Reparations: Combatant Deaths and Compensation in Unlawful Wars

Recent events have sparked a renewed interest in the law and practice of war reparations. While today it is uncontroversial that unlawful uses of force, including acts of aggression, entail the obligation of the wrongdoing state to make reparations, including by way of compensation, the precise extent of this obligation remains subject to debate. One particularly contentious aspect is whether, and to what extent, states that violate the prohibition on the use of force are obligated to pay compensation not only for harm caused to civilians and civilian objects, but also for damage caused to the armed forces of the defending state. In this article, we demonstrate that states that engage in unlawful uses of force are indeed obligated to provide compensation for this type of harm. However, we also explain how issues of causation, evidentiary standards, and the financial capacity of the wrongdoing state may in some cases limit the scope of such claims. Moreover, we demonstrate that compensating combatants is not only doctrinally sound but also normatively desirable as it highlights their role as the core victims of unlawful wars. Finally, we elaborate on some of the consequences of this conclusion, including in relation to the individualization of reparation claims, the moral and legal equality of combatants, as well as the normative principles underlying international humanitarian law (“IHL”).

Patent Claim Scope and Biosimilar Competition in the US and EU.

The US has found it hard to establish competition in the market for biologics, which are therapeutics derived from living cells. In the case of small-molecule drugs, the emergence of direct competition from generic drugs at the end of the exclusivity period has provided the impetus for price competition, leading to lower spending. In 2010, to spur competition in the biologics market, Congress created a simplified pathway for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve comparable versions of biologic drugs called biosimilars. Biosimilar competition in the US has nonetheless remained weaker than in European peer countries. For example, as of August 2020, there were 52 biosimilars available in Germany, and only 15 in the US.1 An important contributor to this "biosimilar gap" has been the fact that biosimilars to biologic blockbusters such as adalimumab (Humira) and etanercept (Enbrel) were only (or will only become) commercially available in the US several years after receiving FDA approval, while they were available in Europe years earlier.2 Through the end of 2021, it took biosimilars a median of 301 days between receiving FDA approval and becoming available for use.3 In one recent study, the median length of time between when a biologic drug was approved and when its first biosimilar was made available to US patients was 21.5 years.4 This paucity of competition has contributed to high US spending on biologics. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2022 41% of US drug expenditures was spent on biologics, which represented 16% of US prescriptions.5.

Cousins, Not Twins: Patent Claim Scope vs. The Breadth of Patent Enforcement

Cousins, Not Twins: Patent Claim Scope vs. The Breadth of Patent Enforcement

(Invited) The Importance of Patent Claim Language on the Path from Invention to Product

Patents often offer significant competitive advantage for inventions on the path from discovery to product. Specifically, the inventors/owners of a patent are given the right to prevent other parties from making, using or selling the subject invention. The claims of the patent define the scope of competitive advantage for the subject invention. Regarding patents,[1] “...the name of the game is the claim.” The wording of claims has been called,[2] “...one of the most bizarre sentence structures in the English language.” And, the courts have noted that,[3] “...the nature of language makes it impossible to capture the essence of a thing[invention] in a patent application[claim].” Consequently, electrochemical scientists, engineers and technologists involved in transitioning discoveries to product are well advised to understand the meaning and scope of the claims in their patented inventions.In this presentation, we will compare and contrast claims as analogous to real estate property. We will provide a brief history of U.S. patent law in terms of the requirements of claims in a patent application. We will review claim construction, i.e., establishing the meaning and scope of an invention, beginning with the inventor internal Invention Disclosure, the preparation of the patent application with a patent attorney, and the examination of the patent application by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Once the patent application is allowed and issues as a patent, the meaning and scope of the claim is settled, unless the patent becomes the subject of a patent validity or infringement challenge.During patent infringement challenges, the meaning and scope of the patent claims are determined in order to decide if the patent is valid and/or if infringement has occurred. We will review the rationale and evolution of claim construction from a factual inquiry by juries to a matter of law determined by the courts. We will present the hierarchy of factors used by the courts during claim construction.Finally, we will conclude the presentation with a brief review of claim construction during a lithium battery infringement case.[4] We conclude the inventor can play a significant role in claim construction with the initial preparation of the internal Invention Disclosure, the preparation of the patent application with a patent professional, and during the examination of the patent application by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Acknowledgements: The financial support of Faraday Technology, Inc. corporate R&D is gratefully acknowledged.

A rationale-augmented NLP framework to identify unilateral contractual change risk for construction projects

Construction projects often see owners who exert their dominance by modifying the standard contracts without contractors’ prior consent. This can lead to undesirable outcomes for contractors, thus referred to as unilateral contractual change risk (UCCR) in this study. As such, identifying UCCR proactively becomes essential for contractors, particularly in engineering-procurement-construction (EPC) projects where the claim scope is limited. Although natural language processing (NLP) has shown promise in the identification of UCCR, it faces difficulties due to the high cognitive demands required. To fill the gap, we propose a rational-augmented NLP framework that emulates human reasoning to identify UCCR in EPC contracts in an explainable and effective manner. The framework (1) leverages NLP techniques to disassemble contract text into features that draw the attention of human readers for obligation-related comprehension, and (2) generates a coherent sequence of intermediate reasoning steps using a customized Microsoft Excel and-in interface to identify predetermined categories of UCCR. Our framework, which achieves an outstanding F1 score of 0.87, is trained on a widely used standard form of EPC contract. It also presents a user-friendly interface for contractors to discern any intentional or malicious acts committed by the owner during the contract stage. Furthermore, our methodology can be adapted to enhance risk management in other sectors.

상속분가액지급청구의 범위

The legal nature of the claim right for payment of the amount equivalent to portion under Article 1014 of the Civil Act should be considered as a claim right for division of inherited property.
 However, when determining the scope of the claim, it should be interpreted in a form that conforms to the payment of the amount, and the legal principle of claim for return of unjust enrichment should apply. The specific results of the analysis on the scope are as follows.
 First, the valuation time of the unjust enrichment subject to be returned should be based on the time of realistic payment of the amount.
 Second, the fruits arising from the inherited property are also included in the scope of valuation, and therefore, a claim for return of unjust enrichment is possible.
 Third, from the time at which the affiliation or trial confirmation becomes known to co-inheritors and from the time at which co-inheritors receive a claim for payment of inheritance equivalent to a portion from the affiliated, whichever occurs first, the co-inheritors are considered as a person enriched in bad faith.
 Therefore, it is necessary to return the amount equivalent to the present value at that time, plus interest from that time until the actual payment date, and if there is any damages, compensation should also be made.
 Fourth, in the case where the inherited property is disposed of without division or before division, it is reasonable to claim for payment of the amount equivalent to portion as the meaning of the vicarious compensation division only for the disposed property and divide the remaining property based on specific inheritance portions.
 Fifth, since the inheritance obligation is not the subject of inheritance property division, the scope of claim for payment of the amount equivalent to portion applies only to the positive property.

A Study on the Disputes of the Scope of Claims Secured by Line of Credit Mortgages

A Study on the Disputes of the Scope of Claims Secured by Line of Credit Mortgages

The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman

Reviewed by: The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman Kathryn Schumaker (bio) The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. By Sarah Coleman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook) Historians of immigration in the twentieth-century United States have long noted how restrictive policies created a class of unauthorized people who lived in the shadow of the law. At the same time, the 1960s spurred a revolution in individual rights, expanding the scope of claims all persons—including noncitizens—could make through the Fourteenth Amendment. Sarah Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America examines the people caught in between these two important developments, exploring the battles over the rights of unauthorized immigrants. This well-written and thoroughly researched book tells an often-surprising story that reveals how the states—and not the federal government—were frequently the laboratories of restrictive immigration policies in the late twentieth century. Coleman begins with Plyler v. Doe (1982), a landmark United States Supreme Court case that questioned the constitutionality of a Texas state law that allowed school districts to charge tuition to students who could not prove their legal status. The Supreme Court had ruled a decade earlier that the Fourteenth Amendment did not include a constitutional right to education. Could Texas charge tuition to unauthorized families or exclude them from public schools entirely? The first two chapters examine how these questions vexed the Carter and Reagan administrations, where officials saw unauthorized children as sympathetic figures, but also recognized that immigration [End Page 449] was a hot-button issue with voters. Though unauthorized immigrants were a convenient political target for members of state legislatures—especially in their inability to respond at the ballot box—officials were wary of punishing children. The Supreme Court eventually ruled the law unconstitutional in 1982. But the concerns about childhood that restrained some policymakers and judges in Plyler did little to deter efforts by state legislatures to target adults. Amid press warnings that linked rising unemployment rates to unauthorized workers, states passed laws criminalizing the employers who hired them. The next two chapters examine how this issue scrambled traditional partisan divides. The Chamber of Commerce and many Republicans opposed a federal law because it targeted business owners. Latino advocacy groups recognized that the law risked the possibility that, fearful of prosecution, employers could refuse to hire any identifiably Latino person. Ultimately, these concerns contributed to the passage of the 1986 federal immigration law that included (largely unenforceable) sanctions for employers, but also prohibited discrimination on the basis of alienage and national origin in hiring. The final chapters focus on the 1990s, when both political parties lurched rightward on immigration. The fifth chapter examines how immigration again came to the fore amid an economic downturn, culminating in Clinton-era welfare reform that ended the ability of noncitizens to access public benefits, including cash assistance and food stamps, regardless of their legal status. The final chapter explains how states paved the way for new restrictive immigration policies, leading Congress to ultimately buttress the authority of state and local officials to carry out immigration enforcement in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The Walls Within is a story of lawyers, judges, policy advisers, senators, and other elites as they made immigration law and policy in courtrooms and offices. Unauthorized immigrants existed abstractly for these people, especially for politicians who sought to use [End Page 450] immigration policy to woo conservative white voters (in the case of Clinton) or appeal to Latino voters (as Reagan did). The book, therefore, has less to say about how these legal and policy changes affected immigrants' everyday lives. Nonetheless it offers a clear policy and legal history of the fraught issue of immigrants' rights in the modern United States, especially in its contributions to the growing scholarship on federalism and immigration. [End Page 451] Kathryn Schumaker KATHRYN SCHUMAKER is a historian at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s and is at work on a new book project about interracial families in...

실손의료보험에서 백내장 수술 진료비의 보상책임에 관한 판례 평석

Cataract is a disease in which the lens becomes cloudy due to aging and causes loss of vision. It is treated with surgery to remove the cloudy lens and insert an artificial lens. There are single vision lenses and multifocal lenses as types of intraocular lenses, which are the treatment materials used at this time. Monofocal lenses have the disadvantage of requiring separate corrective glasses for near vision even after insertion, but they are inexpensive and require medical treatment under the National Health Insurance Act. On the other hand, multifocal lenses have the advantage of correcting both near and far vision, but they are expensive and do not qualify for medical care benefits under the National Health Insurance Act.
 In this case, while the state determines the price of the salary, the non-insurance price is set by the medical institution, so the medical institution has an incentive to make a profit by arbitrarily setting the cost of treatment for non-insured items. In particular, in the case of non-insured items covered by medical insurance for indemnity insurance, the patient can claim most of the medical expenses from the insurance company as insurance money. There may be cases in which overpayment or overtreatment may occur.
 In relation to cataract surgery, some eye clinics, mainly in the Gangnam area of Seoul, arbitrarily adjust the cost of examination or multifocal lenses, which are representative non-covered items, according to changes in the health insurance benefit system or medical insurance policy, without reasonable standards. It is confirmed that they are taking advantage of the business by misusing them. For example, in September 2020, when health insurance was applied to the examination fee, it was no longer possible to claim high medical expenses for the examination fee. Excessive indemnity payments are being made in the medical insurance for loss by processing hospitalization and issuing a confirmation of hospitalization, and the damage is being passed on to good medical consumers and insurance organizations.
 However, in the recent judgment of 2021 na 2013354 of the Seoul High Court on January 20, 2022, the scope of claims for medical insurance for medical loss for insured persons who underwent cataract surgery was limited to the amount of out-of-patient insurance, not hospitalization. Based on the Supreme Court’s general definition, it was emphasized that ‘the substance of hospitalization’ should be provided in addition to the standards of the Ministry of Health and Welfare notification. He also pointed out that the fact that the comprehensive fee-for-service system is applied in cataract surgery is completely different from judging whether or not the patients were actually ‘hospitalized’.
 As such, it can be said that the above judgment on the criteria for ‘hospitalization’ for cataract surgery is not limited to the clinic in this case, but is also applied to general ophthalmology clinics performing cataract surgery. Although there is regret in the interpretation of the terms and conditions related to the exemption, I hope that the judgment of the subject judgment regarding hospitalization will be an opportunity to suppress unnecessary and reckless cataract surgery.
 It seems to be a very desirable direction for government ministries, financial supervisory authorities, and the industry to take an interest in the recent cataract surgery and other problems of the surge in medical expenses and to make various efforts and attempts. As a member of society, the court also expects effective and rational judgments that can effectively suppress turmoil in the medical market and protect the rights and interests of good medical care and insurance consumers.

Who are “we”?: Animalism and conjoined twins

AbstractVarious cases of conjoined twinning have been presented as problems for the animalist view that we are animals. In some actual and possible cases of human dicephalus that have been discussed in the literature, it is arguable that there are two persons but only one human animal. It is also tempting to believe that there are two persons and one animal in possible instances of craniopagus parasiticus that have been described. Here it is argued that the animalist can admit that these are cases in which human persons are not animals, without forfeiting the title “animalist.” It is also shown that this is not only an option but also a well‐motivated and plausible option for the animalist. Seeing this requires getting clear on what the word “we” should be thought to include in the animalist's claim that we are animals. Here animalism is defended against twinning objections by figuring out how to view the scope of the animalist's identity claim.

What has been preventing the emergence of a broad social movement on diabetes (and NCDs)? Insights from the mobilisation of diabetes patients' associations in Bamako, Mali

ABSTRACT Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality globally. While international strategies for their prevention and control call for greater civil society participation, many observers regret the lack of a broad social movement to address these diseases. This study focuses on diabetes patients’ associations engaged from 1991 to 2014 in Bamako, Mali, and explores what factors influenced their capacity to build a collective national movement to address this disease and shape policy reforms in this area. Our findings show that the emergence of such a movement was limited by several constraints. The focus of diabetes patients’ associations on technical biomedical issues silenced the daily embodied experience of patients and reduced the use of human-rights approaches. Moreover, few financial, material and social resources coupled with a fragmented base limited the scope and strength of claims made by patients’ associations to obtain treatment at reduced coasts. Finally, modes of actions performed failed to challenge more structural inequalities and imbalances of power. Exacerbated by limited political opportunities, these constraints weakened the associations’ ability to drive policy change on diabetes. They reflect some of the current weaknesses of the global mobilisation to address diabetes and NCDs.

Interocean v Nigeria: Can a Domestic Investment Statute Provide the Basis for Claims under Customary International law?

In an Award dated 6 October 2020 (Award), the Tribunal in Interocean Oil Development Company and Interocean Oil Exploration Company v Federal Republic of Nigeria3 dismissed all the claims brought by two United States oil companies, Interocean Oil Development Company and Interocean Oil Exploration Company (Interocean), against Nigeria, and awarded arbitration costs to Nigeria. The Award confirms the possibility of bringing an investment claim for breach of customary international law based solely on a domestic investment statute. In doing so, the Award has not only expanded the potential scope of investment claims for foreign investors in Nigeria, especially for those who are not eligible for substantive protections under any investment treaties; it has also enriched investment arbitration jurisprudence. The Award is a landmark decision in Nigeria because it arose from the first investment arbitration instituted against Nigeria with a decision on the merits. Prior to the Interocean case, two...

Pac. Biosciences of California, Inc. v. Oxford Nanopore Techs., Inc. United States Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit, 2021 996 F.3d 134

Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (PacBio) sued Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Inc. and Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd. (collectively, Oxford), accusing Oxford of infringing several of its patents, including U.S. Patent Nos. 9,546,400 and 9,772,323. The patents describe and claim methods for using technology to sequence DNA and other nucleic acids. A jury found all asserted claims infringed but also determined that they are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 112 for lack of enablement. The district court denied PacBio's motion for judgment as a matter of law (and for a new trial) on enablement. The district court also denied PacBio's request that the court grant a new trial because of Oxford's improper remarks during opening, remarks that included references to the potential applications of its accused products to the then-emerging global COVID-19 crisis. PacBio argued that the remarks caused prejudice that could not be remedied by the curative instruction the district court gave at PacBio's request. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed. Regarding enablement, the court noted that it is not enough that relevant artisans knew how to perform some nanopore sequencing'' before the priority date of the patents, and that the jury had substantial evidence of non-enablement of the full claim scope. Notably, PacBio had no evidence of actual reduction to practice of its own that would undermine Oxford's evidence of non-enablement. As PacBio acknowledged, its reduction to practice was constructive only, i.e., took the form of its description in patent applications, without any accompanying real-world reduction to practice. The Federal Circuit did not see a basis for disturbing the district court's assessment that there was an insufficient likelihood that the improper opening remarks had an adverse impact on the ultimate verdict to justify a new trial in this case.

The partial waiver of the rights and partial invalidation of rights to the invention

Borovyk P. The partial waiver of the rights and partial invalidation of rights to the invention. In view of changes in the Law of Ukraine «About protection of rights for inventions and utility models» introduced according to the Law No. 816-IX as of 21.07.2020, it is implied that a patent owner can waive rights provided by a state registration of an invention (utility model) fully or partially, and a court can render the rights for the invention (utility model) invalid fully or partially. The partial waiver of the rights or rendering the rights invalid causes a number of issues on a rather frequent basis, in particular, regarding a certain procedure of defining the entire scope of rights according to the patent and a portion of these rights. Since the scope of rights is defined by claims, the partial waiver of the rights or the partial rendering the rights invalid substantially represents a change of the scope of rights, which are defined by the claims as published. The patent may be granted for a group of inventions. In such case, the scope of rights shall be defined by the claims that comprise several independent claims. Here, the partial waiver of the rights for the invention may be carried out by waiving one or several independent claims at the discretion of the patent owner or by rendering one or several independent claims invalid by the court. Therewith, the scope of rights that is defined during conduction of an examination for another invention of the group of inventions, which are mentioned in a single protection document (patent), is not changed. The partial waiver or the partial rendering the rights for the invention invalid for the claims having one independent claim is a more problematic case. A key aspect of this problem is an influence of the proposed amendments of the claims onto the scope of rights for the invention and its correspondence with the requirements for granting a legal protection. More specifically, it is an establishment of a fact of reduction of the scope of rights when introducing the proposed amendments into the independent claim and examination of a new version of the independent claim for compliance with the requirements of patentability. An important aspect also lies in establishment of a balance of interests of the patent owner and third parties. The patent owner will receive a mechanism of implementation of the right for protection of allowable embodiments of the invention, while the third parties will receive a right for a legal certainty by means of an analysis of the scope of rights of the new version of the claims. The article discloses grounds for waiving the rights for the invention and the mechanism for implementation of the waiver under the legislation in force both for the case of the group of inventions and for the partial waiver or the partial rendering the rights for the invention invalid with the claims having one independent claim.
 Keywords: scope of rights, independent and dependent claims, amendment to claims, proceedings

Malpractice trends in shoulder and elbow surgery.

Medical malpractice is a very common occurrence that many medical providers will have to face; approximately 17,000 medical malpractice cases are filed in the United States each year, and more than 99% of all surgeons are faced with at least 1 instance of malpractice litigation throughout their careers. Malpractice litigation also carries a major economic weight, with medical malpractice spending resulting in an aggregate expenditure of nearly $60 billion annually in the United States. Orthopedic surgery is one of the most common subspecialties involved in malpractice claims. Currently, there are no comprehensive studies examining malpractice lawsuits within shoulder and elbow surgery. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to examine trends in malpractice claims in shoulder and elbow surgery. The Westlaw online legal database was queried in order to identify state and federal jury verdicts and settlements pertaining to shoulder and elbow surgery from 2010-2020. Only cases involving medical malpractice in which an orthopedic shoulder and elbow surgeon was a named defendant were included for analysis. All available details pertaining to the cases were collected. This included plaintiff demographic and geographic data. Details regarding the cases were also collected, such as anatomic location, pathology, complications, and case outcomes. Twenty-five malpractice lawsuits pertaining to orthopedic shoulder and elbow surgery were identified. Most plaintiffs in these cases were adult men, and the majority of cases were filed in the Southwest (28%) and Midwest (28%) regions of the United States. The most common anatomic region involved in claims was the rotator cuff (32%), followed by the glenohumeral joint (20%). The majority of these claims involved surgery (56%). Pain of mechanical nature was the most common complication seen in claims (56%). The jury ruled in favor of the defendant surgeon in most cases (80%). This is the first study that comprehensively examines the full scope of orthopedic shoulder and elbow malpractice claims across the United States. The most common complaint that plaintiffs reported at the time of litigation was residual pain after treatment due to a mechanical etiology, followed by complaints of nerve damage. A large portion of claims resulted after nonoperative treatment. A better understanding of the trends within malpractice claims is crucial to developing strategies for prevention.

Širenje kruga potraživanja kod jednogodišnjeg roka zastarjelosti

This paper analyses the possibility of an analogous application of Art. 378 of the Law of Contract and Torts (LCT) to other similar (identical) claims. The aim of the research is to try to answer the central question of whether it is necessary to update the provisions of the LCT regarding the one-year Statute of limitations in accordance with modern trends in terms of the scope of claims that should become Statute-barred within this period. In order to answer this question, scientific research methods, that is, techniques are used, such as the dogmatic-normative, historical-legal, and comparative-legal one, content analysis and a questionnaire. This apparatus is used within the study of legislation, case law and legal literature, as well as in empirical research. Knowing the scope of claims that become Statute-barred in a year is not only important for theoretical analysis, but is also of practical importance for court actions , as well as for consumers.

The Track One Pilot Program: Who benefits from prioritized patent examination?

AbstractResearch SummarySpeed is often critical for successful commercialization of a new technology, and patents help entrepreneurs secure funding, enter the market, and avoid expropriation of their ideas. In this article, we employ a recent change to U.S. patent law—the introduction of an elective program accelerating patent examination—to investigate the role of patent examination speed in strategic entrepreneurship. We find that small firms with limited patent portfolios are the most likely to expedite their patent applications. Moreover, accelerated patents are cited and litigated at higher rates than other patents, and these outcomes are more sensitive to exogenous changes to patent scope. Our results suggest that providing the option to accelerate patent examination may help increase incentives for innovation by strategic entrepreneurs.Managerial SummaryPatents are essential to high‐tech businesses, helping them to secure funding and exclude competitors from the marketplace. We evaluate a USPTO pilot program that allowed patent applicants to accelerate patent examination, yielding a patent in less than 1 year when typically 3 or more years are required. We find that entrepreneurs are more likely to use the program than large firms. Moreover, patents examined under the program tend to be strategically important. They are litigated and cited at higher rates than other patents, and the scope of the patents' claims plays a key role in these outcomes. Collectively our results suggest that multi‐track patent examination programs are likely to have a positive effect on generating new ideas, increasing value capture for entrepreneurs, and facilitating the growth of small businesses. Our results also suggest that the USPTO has implemented the program successfully by accelerating examination without sacrificing quality.

General Deterrence of Systemic International Misconduct: The Role of Firms’ Territoriality Beliefs

For decades, Swiss banks’ private wealth management (PWM) business had systemically engaged in organizational misconduct based on jurisdictional arbitrage. Swiss banks complied with Swiss regulations, but persistently transgressed United States (U.S.) law by helping clients evade U.S. tax liabilities. Our interpretive study explores why the U.S. government’s enforcement of U.S. law (the challenger’s territoriality, i.e. claims of authority over a certain actor, geographic, and issue scope) against some Swiss banks eventually deterred not only prosecuted banks (specific deterrence) but also observing peers (general deterrence) from violating U.S. law. We identify observers’ territoriality beliefs about the scope of the challenger’s territory and about their conduct’s location within or outside that perceived territory as the critical factor for general deterrence. Such beliefs are shaped by the challenger’s, incumbent’s scope of territoriality claims, and the level of ambiguity of the challenger’s claims. Our study contributes to institutional, regulatory and territoriality scholarship.