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英文文献：Why weak patents? Rational ignorance or pro-"customer" Tilt?-为什么脆弱的专利?理性的无知还是倾向于“顾客”?弱专利的发放被广泛认为是当前美国专利制度的一个根本问题
英文文献作者：Lei, Zhen,Wright, Brian D.
英文文献摘要：
The issuance of weak patents is widely viewed as a fundamental problem in the current US patent system. Reasons that have been offered for the granting of weak patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) include examiners’ “rational ignorance” of the patentability of applications and pro-“customer” rules and institutions that create incentives for examiners to grant patents of dubious validity to their “customers”- applicants. In this paper, we study whether US examiners’ behavior in prior art search betrays their assessment of applications’ patentability. For a sample of US patents for which applications were also filed at the European Patent Office (EPO), we construct a measure of the fraction of prior art that is missed by US examiners. We find that this measure significantly explains the probability of receiving a patent at the EPO. The results are robust to different empirical specifications. US examiners’ prior art searches indicate that they are, on average, not “rationally ignorant”. On the contrary, they identify and dedicate more search effort to those applications that seem more problematic, because they bear the burden of proof of non-patentability. Our study offers empirical evidence that a systematic problem of weak patents likely exists, and suggests that the problem may be more strongly attributable to the pro-applicant rules and policies than to examiners’ ignorance. The current prevalence of weak patents does not appear to be caused at the margin by lack of resources at the USPTO.
美国专利商标局(USPTO)批准弱专利的原因包括审查员对申请的可专利性“理性无知”，以及有利于“客户”的规则和制度，这些规则和制度鼓励审查员向其“客户”——申请人授予效力可疑的专利。在本文中，我们研究了美国审查人员在现有技术搜索中的行为是否违背了他们对申请人可专利性的评估。对于一个同样在欧洲专利局(EPO)申请的美国专利样本，我们构建了一个现有技术被美国审查员遗漏的比例的度量。我们发现，这一措施显著地解释了在EPO获得专利的可能性。结果对不同的实证规范具有较强的鲁棒性。美国审查员的现有技术搜索表明，平均而言，他们不是“理性无知”。相反，他们将更多的搜索精力用于那些看起来更有问题的应用程序，因为它们承担了非专利性的举证责任。我们的研究提供了经验证据，表明弱专利的系统性问题可能存在，并表明该问题可能更强烈地归因于亲申请人规则和政策，而不是审查员的无知。目前流行的弱专利似乎不是由美国专利商标局缺乏资源造成的边际。
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