Intellectual Property Research
Tribal Economic Development
Intellectual Property Research
In intellectual property Prof. Clarkson’s research involves developing fundamental insights into the interrelationships between multiple technologies, particularly in the case of patent pools. Patent pools are an organizational structure where multiple firms aggregate patent rights into a package for licensing, a potential solution to the problem of patent thickets--the dense web of overlapping intellectual property rights that an organization must “hack” its way through in order to commercialize new technology.
Although the existence of patent thickets has been theorized, an objective determination of their existence has never been formulated. He is developing a computational methodology for identifying patent thickets in a manner somewhat similar to mapping gravimetric patterns in outer space and identifying black holes based on the density of gravimetric distortions.
Follow-on research will develop methodologies for objective determination of the economic interrelationships between two technologies based on computational assessments of textual closeness (based on the patent texts) as well as computational assessments of structural similarity of patent citation patterns. The combination of these two measures will allow for the objective categorization of the relationship between two technologies as either Blocking, Complementary, Independent, or Substitutes (“BCIS”). Such an objective categorization would have potentially significant policy implications in instances where the intellectual property and antitrust regimes intersect.
This research will likely be extended to include data visualization techniques for representing patent space, both in terms of patent density as well as for the BCIS technological interrelationships.
In tribal economic development he has consulted, written, and published extensively on tribal sovereignty, tribal governance systems, tribal economic development, and tribal asset management. His research interests include the development of tribal court systems, tribal access to capital markets, and the determinants of success for tribal entrepreneurship.
In order to identify factors that constrain tribes from tapping into capital markets effectively, he is developing a database of tribal financial transactions, the Tribal Finance Information Clearinghouse, to explore questions related to tribal interaction with the capital markets and develop answers based on a complete set of information.
Although the data collection proposed as part of the TFIC project will facilitate the examination of numerous economic questions, the ultimate goal of the project is to provide an online financial information resource to tribes and tribal finance officers. The availability of this data will allow tribal leaders and academic researchers to explore questions such as: when financing the construction of a road or a school, how much more would a tribe pay in interest than a municipality with similar financial characteristics? As an exercise in informational empowerment, the impact of greater data availability will be measurable relative to tribes and their interactions with investment bankers, credit insurers, and rating agencies. Additionally, pressing economic questions that have been previously unanswerable due to lack of data can be explored regarding the evolution of tribal finance.
Tribes will also benefit if organizations that service the tribal finance market (investment banks, credit insurers, and rating agencies) can access the data in order to have a better understanding of that market. Working in conjunction with the Native American Tribal Finance Officers Association as well as individual tribal governments, the TFIC project will build a web-based information system that will make available the initial three sets of data as well as any data collected in the future. The system will also be able to support scholarly inquiry.
In addition to its relevance for economic development in Indian Country, Dr. Clarkson’s database development project will also be an exercise in intergovernmental information sharing. There are more than 550 federally recognized tribes, and this project will attempt to prompt a substantial number of them to contribute information to the database. Tribes that contribute to the database will also be asked to disclose previously non-public information about privately placed financial transactions. In return however, the value of the database to a tribe will increase with the availability of data from multiple tribes – a network effect.