The Complexity of the Patent System
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
March 12 – 14, 2018
Santa Fe Institute
Co-sponsored by Cote Capital, The Farrington Group, Licensing Executives Society (LES) - USA & Canada, and U.S Inventor
Most inquiries into the nature, properties, and behaviors of the US Patent System, and intellectual property systems more generally, do not focus on the system itself, yet this is clearly an open-ended, historical, and adaptive system. The US Patent System: (i) takes in, (ii) recognizes, (iii) identifies, (iv) classifies, and (v) generates information under often conflicting expectations. Evaluating the patent system with this lens is now particularly important because of recent, and possible future, changes to intellectual property rules and practices across the globe. This unique approach is also necessary to evaluate claims that AI will revolutionize the US Patent Office.
Specific questions explored in the meeting include:
What are the salient properties of the patent system as an information processing system?
What does it mean for such to “break-down”?
What are the inherent, yet perhaps not very visible, trade-offs in a patent system?
Does the nature and structure of the patenting system as currently constituted render its output less useful for research purposes?
Unlike typical ACtioN meetings, this three-day meeting will be discussion based and will aim to make meaningful progress towards the above questions. In addition to SFI-affiliated scientists, the meeting will also include leading practitioners. Each ACtioN member may send one representative to this meeting. Members are strongly encouraged to select either their head of intellectual property or their head of innovation as their representative.