Strengthening IPR creates a surge in patenting applications

Starting in the early 1980s, there began a series of changes to patent policy and practice in the U.S. that have had the generally perceived effect of strengthening the protection that patents provide, and extending the applicability of that protection institutionally, geographically and technologically. Roughly coincident in time with these significant changes in the legal and institutional environment, there has been a dramatic, historically unprecedented surge in patenting by U.S. inventors. This confluence of events provides a major challenge and opportunity for scholars of technological change and for science and technology policy. On the one hand, significant changes in property-rights regimes do not happen very often and provide, at least in principle, an unusual set of “natural experiments” that ought to greatly improve our ability to understand how different regimes affect behavior. On the other hand, policy-makers have a right to expect that social scientists can analyze these developments and provide vital input regarding the economic and social consequences of policy changes of this sort.