Low quality patent

The description low quality patent is a modern term, possibly not used at the time of early aviation. In the modern patent literature in economics, "high quality" is indicated by (a) whether a patent was cited by later patents, and how many times; (b) whether its existence appears to raise the stock price of the company that owns it.

We might mark a patent as of higher or lower quality to the extent that:

• there isn't corroborating evidence the invention worked
• there aren't enough specifics in the patent document itself to see how to make or use the invention, e.g. there's no quantification of how big a component is, or how it should be constructed
  • possible measure of that: does the patent refer to measurements of the device
• it's cited, or not cited
• it comes from an inventor who had other high or low quality patents, or was applied for by an organization that had standards for such things
• it was cleared by a patent examiner, or was filed in a patent registration system that did not require examination
• it had a patent agent who would have had quality criteria, or who would not have ; e.g. can we show that certain patent agents only file high quality patents, or only file low ones?
• it is clear what was made and is being claimed
• whether the patent was renewed, in systems where the patentee needed to pay more to extend its duration
• whether, in fact, a company owned it, or whether knowledgeable third parties, of various kinds, saw is as in their interests to own it, that is, with third party filing serving, tentatively, as an indicator of high quality

If we have enough cases of high- and low- quality patent measures. we could publish statistics about which attributes correspond or predict other attributes. That's social science worth publishing.

Higher fees to file a patent application are associated with selection for higher quality according to this work:

• Are Patent Fees Effective at Weeding out Low-quality Patents?
• Gaétan de Rassenfosse, Adam B. Jaffe
• NBER Working Paper No. 20785, Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20785, https://www.nber.org/papers/w20785
• Revised in July 2016
• The paper investigates whether patent fees are an effective mechanism to deter the filing of low-quality patent applications. The study analyzes the effect on patent quality of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1982, which resulted in a substantial increase in patenting fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Results from a series of difference-in-differences regressions suggest that the increase in fees led to a weeding out of low-quality patents. About 14 per cent of patents in the lowest quality decile were filtered out, and the effect was especially visible for companies with a large patent portfolio. The study has strong policy implications in the current context of concerns about declines in patent quality.
• Later published as: Gaétan de Rassenfosse & Adam B. Jaffe, 2018. "Are patent fees effective at weeding out low-quality patents?," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, vol 27(1), pages 134-148.