Ex parte Allen. The doctrine of equivalents. Methods of doing business. Interferences. The First Inventor Defense Act. Reduction to practice. The mental steps doctrine. Disclosure under section 102(e). Derivation under section 102(f). The recapture rule. Laches and estoppel. Graver Tank v. Linde Air Products Co. Jepson claims.

The patent bar is a priesthood with its own secret dialect, intelligible only to initiates. Two economists--Adam B. Jaffe of Brandeis University and Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School--have now undertaken to translate for the rest of us the inner workings of the patent process and then to dissect what plagues it. Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation and Progress and What to Do about It is to be published by Princeton University Press in October. The book describes how two seemingly well-meaning changes made by the U.S. Congress have engendered the current crisis.

This article was originally published with the title The Silent Revolution.

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