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89 St. John's L. Rev. 1185 (2015)
A Case for Weakening Patent Rights

handle is hein.journals/stjohn89 and id is 1205 raw text is: A CASE FOR WEAKENING PATENT RIGHTS LUCAS S. OSBORN' JOSHUA M. PEARCEt AMBERLEE HASELHUHNttt INTRODUCTION When you were in school, when did you learn the most? When your teacher pushed you with high expectations and you knew you were competing with other students, or when you took a pass-fail course where attendance was optional? When do you think athletes get into the best shape? When they are competing against others and being pushed by their coach, or when they work out alone with no clear competition in mind? In the same way, when do you think inventors and firms are the most competitive and innovative? When they are being pushed by their competitors to develop the best product, or when they can rest behind a twenty-year exclusivity provided by a patent? At first, the answer seems clear: The firm with the patent would be complacent and less productive than the firm that must fight hard to out-innovate its competitors continually.' Yet, the I Associate Professor, Campbell University, Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law. t Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering & Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan Technological University. ttt Ph.D., Summer 2016, Materials Science and Engineering, Michigan Technological University. 1 See Robert P. Merges & Richard R. Nelson, On the Complex Economics of Patent Scope, 90 COLUM. L. REV. 839, 872 & n.141 (1990) (describing historical instances of entrepreneurs that quickly turned into lazy established firms); Andreas Panagopoulos, The Effect of IP Protection on Radical and Incremental Innovation, 2 J. KNOWLEDGE ECON. 393, 394-95 (2011) (noting that strong patents can negatively affect commercialization rates and stating that lack of competition can lead an innovator to rest on her laurels failing to advance a valuable and radical innovation further). This intuition fits with sociological theory, as well. See Stephanie Plamondon Bair, The Psychology of Patent Protection, 48 CONN. L. REV. 297, 325-26 (2015) (applying Parkinson's law, which states that work expands to fill the time 1185

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