"Untangling the Thicket: Ownership Fragmentation, Technological Diversity and Patent Litigation"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The shift from discrete innovation processes to processes that increasingly rely on the recombination of knowledge across technological boundaries, has resulted in the emergence of complex technologies based on a large number of patents. As a consequence, the patent system is experiencing significant increases in the fragmentation of ownership rights and the presence of unclear property boundaries – the patent “thicket”. In this paper we develop a theoretical framework which articulates the relationships of ownership fragmentation and knowledge diversity to patent litigation hazard. We test the theory using a unique, highly complete dataset which contains information on all patent lawsuits and all public firms in the US between 2000 and 2005. We find that both the fragmentation of ownership rights and the presence of unclear property boundaries associated with technological diversity increases the likelihood of litigation. We also find that the effect of ownership fragmentation is greater for small firms. These findings are robust to a number of alternative specifications and have significant implications for patent policy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".