Reducing the cost of resolving intellectual property disputes

An important reason why intellectual property is far less effective for generating innovation than it could be is the excessively high cost of resolving disputes. This largely reflects the use of ordinary court arrangements to determine what are essentially technical issues. Compulsory expert arbitration, with legal aid for the party that doesnot appeal to the court from a ruling, is proposed as an alternative. A full-scale working model of such a system is shown to exist in the interference procedure of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. That no more than 4 percent of court appeals from decisions in this are even partially successful augurs well for the potential value of the arrangements proposed.