How Well Does Patent Screening Work?

Mark Schankerman was interviewed by Tim Phillips for the CEPR Vox Podcast. 

Mark Schankerman and co-author William Matcham spent eight years building the tools to find out. Using natural language processing across a dataset of around one million patent applications, twenty million claims, and fifty-five million examiner decisions, they measure how similar each incoming claim is to the hundred million claims that preceded it, going back to 1976. They find that 81% of initial patent claims fall below the patentability threshold; examiners must negotiate that figure down round by round. And they do a pretty good job. But around a third of all abandoned applications contain at least one valid claim the system failed to protect. You don’t see patents that aren’t awarded, so those errors have, until now, been invisible. 

Find out more (transcript and link to the podcast) on the CEPR website.