Patenting inventions or inventing patents? Continuation practice at the USPTO

Cesare Righi and Timothy Simcoe

RAND Journal of Economics, 2023, vol. 54, issue 3, 416-442

Abstract: Continuations allow inventors to add new claims to old patents, leading to concerns about unintended infringement and holdup. We study how continuations are used in standard essential patent (SEP) prosecution. Difference in differences estimates suggest that continuation filings increase by 80%–121% after a standard is published. This effect is larger for applicants with licensing‐based business models and for patent examiners with a higher allowance rate. Claim language is more similar for SEPs filed after standard publication, and late‐filing is positively correlated with litigation. These findings suggest widespread use of continuations to draft patents that are infringed by already‐published standards.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1756-2171.12446

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:bla:randje:v:54:y:2023:i:3:p:416-442

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... al.asp?ref=0741-6261

Access Statistics for this article

RAND Journal of Economics is currently edited by James Hosek

More articles in RAND Journal of Economics from RAND Corporation Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().