From the News Pick The Importance
(or Not) of Patents to UK Firms, (freely available for down load here, PDF,
970KB) there's a shockingly low participation rate in the patent system by
companies involved in innovation.
From the introduction:
...Our
investigation of this phenomenon in the UK finds that only 1.6% of all
registered firms in the UK patent and that even among those that are engaged in
some broadly defined form of R&D, only around 4% have applied for a UK or
European patent during our period of analysis (1998-2006).1
...In our
data, even in high-tech manufacturing sectors, which arguably produce the most
patentable inventions, the share of patenting firms in the UK does not surpass
10%. Restricting the high-tech sector to R&D-doing firms that also innovate,
the share of patenting firms increases only to 16%. Findings for the US are
similar: Balasubramanian and Sivadasan (2011) find that only 5.5% of US
manufacturing firms own a patent.
...
Reading the paper and
inferring what is happening currently in the United States leads one to the
question of whether the current patent litigation environment in the U.S. isn't
effectively blackmailing firms into participating in the patent system through
threat of litigation, driving the patent numbers through fear of litigation and
not for purposes of innovation. It would have an inflationary effect on the
value of patents.
And in my personal opinion you'd have the CAFC to look to
for the cause of this effect.
Someone ought to do a similar study in the
U.S., in particular in the software or other high tech industries asking the
critical question as to why they seek patent protection. It would likely put
lie to claim that patents encourage innovation, while the 'modern' uptake of
patents more appropriately might be revealed as being for defensive purposes
against litigation 'innovation'.
The out of control emphasis on
patent-ability without regard to patent quality may have enabled the use of
patents for purely anti-competitive purposes.
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