LILtalks Presents: Who is Patent Disclosure For with Visiting Professor of Law Janet Freilich

Patents are one of the world’s largest public libraries of technological information. Laws governing this library, however, focus on readers of individual patents, and do little to facilitate larger scale, aggregate use.

This LIL talk will illustrate this point through theory and an empirical case study of pharmaceutical patents, while highlighting a broader problem with laws governing information disclosure: they are often designed for readers of individual documents, even as users increasingly seek to aggregate and combine information across legal documents.