A great deal has been written of late on the growing importance of intellectual property rights to the economy. With this new focus has come increased attention to the patent system. It is well known that the number of patents is increasing rapidly. 4 A variety of explanations have been offered for this increase. One explanation is economic: Writers talk of the "new" or "information" economy, in which ideas rather than capital investments are the mainstay of value. 5 As intellectual property

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... omes more central to a company's value, perhaps companies are willing to spend more to protect it. Another explanation is technological: we are in an era of astounding productivity attributable to 1 how nationality relates to area of technology and how the size of the patentee relates to the prosecution process. In this Article, we compare that data set of recent patents to a similarly random sample of 1000 patents issued twenty years earlier, between 1976 and 1978. By studying the differences between the groups, we can get a clear picture of how the patent system has changed over time. The results are dramatic. By almost any measure -subject matter, time spent in prosecution, number of prior art references cited, number of claims, number of continuation applications filed, number of inventors -the patents issued in the late 1990s are more complex than those issued in the 1970s. While some of these effects are attributable to the patenting of new technologies like biotechnology and software, unknown in the early 1970s, the increase in complexity is robust even across areas of technology. Further, the patent system in the 1990s is more heterogeneous than it was in the 1970s. There are far greater differences by area of technology and by nationality in how patents are being prosecuted in the 1990s than there were in the 1970s.