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Those interested in the patent system have long complained of patent thickets as a barrier to efficient production of new products and services. The more patents in an area, the argument goes, the harder it is to enter. There are several studies that attempt to measure the effect of patent thickets, with some studies arguing that thickets can ease private ordering. I'd like to briefly point out another (new) one. Charles deGrazia (U. London, Royal Holloway College), Jesse Frumkin, Nicholas Pairolero (both of USPTO) have posted a new draft on SSRN, called Embracing Technological Similarity for the Measurement of Complexity and Patent Thickets.
[...] The authors use natural language processing to determine overlap in patent claims (and just the claims, arguing that's where the thicket lies) for both backward and forward citations in "triads" - patents that all cite each other. Using this methodology, they compare their results to other attempts to quantify complexity and find greater overlap in more complex technologies - a sign that their method is more accurate. Finally, they validate their results by regressing thickets against examination characteristics, showing that the examination factors more likely to come from thickets (e.g. pendency) are correlated with greater thickets.
https://writtendescription.blogspot.com/2018/06/measuring-patent-thickets.html
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday June 14 2018, @10:18AM
Is there any such thing as a patent-left?
There is the Open Innovation Network (OIN), but that only deals with cross-licensing issues like you seem to be asking about. However, the OIN is completely helpless in the face of non-practicing entities (NPEs aka patent trolls) which have nothing to cross-license nor reason to do so if they did. So the only relief there would b for the US to wise up and roll back patent law to something sane like before and allow copyright to do its job with software.
The only possible advantage of the OIN would be if M$ were to join and that is just not going to happen since their entire Azure strategy hangs upon being able to set patent trolls upon Linux-using competitors [techrights.org] specifically. Another barrier to them joining the OIN is all the money they depend upon from software patent shakedowns on Android/Linux-using companies. The one single thing that M$ could do to show that they are making peace with FOSS in general and GNU/Linux specifically would be to join the OIN. That's not going to happen, ever, as their remaining future income depends on staying out of the OIN.
However that's a digression. The OIN is a little like patent-based copyleft but again it can't do squat about patent trolls.
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