| Abstract: |
Increasing evidence indicates that a large share of granted patents are
''undeserved'' because they do not meet the criteria of novelty or
non-obviousness. In recent decades, many jurisdictions introduced patent
reforms to avoid weak patent applications and improve legal patent quality. In
particular, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), enacted into law in
2011, introduced the post-grant validity challenge at the United States
Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO). This procedure allows any third party
to question granted patents, possibly leading to patent revocation or scope
reduction. This paper aims to provide evidence of the impact of such policy
change on the legal quality of the patent system. To identify the policy
effect we exploit the fact that the same invention is patented in different
legislation and that not all of them have post-grant review procedures. In
particular, we compare the same patent filed at the USPTO and the Canadian
Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). In this setting, we apply standard
Diff-in-Diff analysis to estimate the effect of the post-grant validity
challenge on the patent scope. Our results indicate that the AIA reform
contributed to a reduction of U.S. patent scope in the last decade, indeed
increasing the legal quality of the patent system. |