14th Annual Hon. Helen Wilson Nies Lecture

How can we fix the Patent Office, allowing examiners to effectively distinguish between patentable and unpatentable inventions, without slowing the process to a crawl or wasting a bunch of money? In this lecture Professor Lemley will review the recent literature and consider a number of proposals and their problems. His conclusion is that we can make the Patent Office better, but are unlikely to solve the problem of bad patents.