RT Journal Article
SR 00
ID 10.1093/aler/ahad010
A1 Love, Brian
A1 Lefouili, Yassine
A1 Helmers, Christian
T1 Do Standard-Essential Patent Owners Behave Opportunistically? Evidence from U.S. District Court Dockets
JF American Law and Economics Review
YR 2023
FD 2023
VO vol. 25
IS n° 1
SP 300
OP 337
K1 Litigation
K1 standards
K1 patents
K1 holdup
K1 U.S
AB To what extent and with what effect do owners of standard-essential patents (SEPs) “hold-up” companies that produce standard-compliant products? To explore this question, we construct measures of opportunistic patent licensing behaviors using detailed information collected from the dockets of U.S. patent cases filed (2010-2019) to enforce SEPs and a matched sample of non-SEPs. Overall, we find evidence of opportunistic behavior by the patent enforcer in approximately 77% of SEP and 65% of non-SEP assertions in court. The figures mask important heterogeneity. There is significantly more opportunistic conduct aimed at increasing a potential licensee’s loss if the patent enforcer prevails in court: 35% of SEP assertions vs. 10% of non-SEP assertions. In contrast, conduct that increases a potential licensee’s litigation costs is less common and the difference between SEP assertions (8%) and non-SEP assertions (6%) is small. We also show that opportunistic behavior is associated with case outcomes, with the effect on settlement depending on the type of opportunistic behavior. Behavior that increases a potential licensee’s litigation costs is associated with an increase in the probability  of settlement, while behavior that increases a potential licensee’s loss if the patent enforcer prevails in court is negatively associated with settlement.
PB Oxford Academic review
SN 1465-7252
LK https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/48198/
UL http://tse-fr.eu/pub/128463