It is an important concern that innovators by waiving their patent rights might obstruct the disclosure of knowledge and therefore retard progress. This paper explores this concern by using a simple model of two innovators who must decide sequentially whether to protect an innovation with limited patent rights. Two features are crucial to the disclosure decision. First: the second inventor may use his valid patent right to exclude the first inventor from using a secret invention. Second: when waiving her patent right, the first inventor may disclose her knowledge outside of a patent. Disclosure informs the Patent Office and courts that related inventions from later inventors may lack novelty and hence should not be protected by valid patent rights. This paper shows that when the first inventor chooses not to patent the innovation, the amount of disclosure is related to the intellectual property choices in a paradoxical way: the amount of disclosure will be ‘large’ (‘small’) when the second inventor chooses secrecy (patenting) to protect the innovation too.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía in its series Economics Working Papers with number
we077241.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? Each page is provided with a technical contact, in case something is not right with the supplied information. See under "publisher info".