The strategic use of fuzziness in patent specifications

Alexandra Zaby and Diana Heger

No 13-043, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Innovators seek to protect their intellectual assets by patenting them, at the same time trying to avoid any disclosure of critical knowledge. Given that a patent specification has to include a clear description of the patented matter so that anybody skilled in the art is enabled to reproduce the invention, the non-disclosure intention seems contradictory to patent law. This paper provides a model identifying the incentives for firms to deliberately obscure their inventive knowledge in a patent specification.

Keywords: patent specification; disclosure requirement; strategic firm behavior; fuzzy patents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 L24 O31 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/77974/1/755982924.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:13043

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().