Ryan Whalen

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87.1
A Network Theory of Patentability
Laura G. Pedraza-Fariña
JD, PhD, Associate Professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

We thank Ronald Allen, Omri Ben-Shahar, Brian Casey, Shari Seidman Diamond, Janet Freilich, Ezra Friedman, Yaniv Heled, William Hubbard, Dmitry Karshtedt, Mark Lemley, Jonathan Masur, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Anya Prince, W. Nicholson Price II, Rachel Sachs, Ana Santos Rutschman, David Schwartz, Michal Shur-Ofry, Matthew Spitzer, and Patti Zettler for helpful insights and comments. In addition, we are grateful for feedback from participants at the DePaul University College of Law faculty workshop, Georgetown University Law School Workshop on Empirical Methods and Patents, Georgia State University faculty workshop, Stanford Law School faculty workshop, The University of Chicago Law School law and economics workshop, 2018 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference (IPSC); CREATe Speaker Series at the University of Glasgow; Peking University School of Transnational Law Speaker Series; 2018 Regulation and Innovation in the Biosciences (RIBS) Conference at Washington University; University of Chicago–Tsinghua University Young Faculty Forum on Law & Social Science; and the University of Hong Kong Law & Technology Speaker Series. We also thank Michael Ellenberger for extraordinary research assistance.

Ryan Whalen
JD, PhD, Assistant Professor in the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Law.
In the United States, and in every single patent system in the world, one patentability doctrine—the nonobviousness doctrine—stands as the cornerstone of the patent bargain. This bargain ensures that the government only grants the monopoly associated with a patent when the inventor has created something sufficiently different from what came before.

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