Weak patents suppress market competition
Kwan, Assistant professor in department of systems management engineering/industrial engineering and graduate school of technology management at Sungkyunkwan University, ‘21
[Seokbeom, February 2021, Science Direct, “The prevalence of weak patents in the United States: A new method to identify weak patents and the implications for patent policy”, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160791X20312720#:~:text=Issuing%20weak%20patents%20could%20also,from%20monopoly)%20%5B8%5D, Accessed July 10 2024, AMH]
Scholars suggest that the issuance of too many patents with dubious validity (hereafter, weak patents1) for a lack of novelty [5] and/or non-obviousness is one of the reasons. Testing novelty and non-obviousness is primarily based on the existing prior arts to the invention in question [6]. Therefore, failure to search and consider the complete set of prior arts leads to improper testing of the invention's novelty and non-obviousness, which eventually results in the issuance of weak patents and, consequentially, legal disputes over patent infringement or the validity of the patent claim [7]. Issuing weak patents could also be the subject of antitrust policy concern because imperfect patent examinations result in granting overly broad patent scopes, which may suppress market competition (i.e., social cost from monopoly) [8]. As a policy response, authorities attempt to implement various institutional measures to improve the quality of patent examination [9]. In the U.S., “improving the patent (legal) quality” has been a long-standing policy agenda [10,11]. Because patent examiners decide the patentability or validity of patents based on prior arts [[12], [13], [14], [15]], policy efforts have been focused on facilitating prior art searches in patent examinations.