Disclose by Law, Obfuscate by Strategy: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Patent Filings

The patent system encourages dissemination of technical information by granting inventors exclusive rights to their inventions in exchange for public disclosure of their technology. The American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA), enacted in 1999, advanced this goal by increasing the scope and speed of disclosure. Previously, filings were published only if and when a patent was granted, but under the AIPA most applications are published eighteen months after filing. The sum of those changes amplified a fundamental tradeoff between protection and exposure.

Although patents offer protection, competitors can exploit disclosures by integrating the innovations into their own research and development efforts. We ask if firms responded to the AIPA by making their applications less understandable to offset its increased disclosure obligations. We hypothesize that patent applicants muddy the water by using complex language. In other words, we expect firms to respond to the AIPA strategically—using obfuscatory language to mitigate the downside of disclosing technologies.

Obfuscation hinders competitors’ efforts to assimilate disclosed innovations. To investigate our hypothesis, we employ tools from corpus linguistics to assess the readability of patent texts after implementation of the AIPA. Our analysis offers evidence that the AIPA’s increased publication requirements inadvertently encouraged applicants to obfuscate their disclosures with complex, convoluted language. Such strategic behaviors may hinder the patent system’s goal of disseminating technical information.