The Malleability of Patent Rights

The Use and Value of Patent Rights

International Patent Harmonization and Trade Balance of Patent Rights

The economic implications of international patent harmonization have attracted little empirical scrutiny. Based on patent application and renewal data in major European countries since the early 1980s, this paper examines the empirical relationship between international patenting, R&D, and “trade flows” of patent rights across national borders. The analysis reveals a substantial patent “trade i...

Patent Pools: Intellectual Property Rights and Competition

Patent pools do not correct all problems associated with patent thickets. In this respect, patent pools might not stop the outsider problem from striking pools. Moreover, patent pools can be expensive to negotiate, can exclude patent holders with smaller numbers of patents or enable a group of major players to form a cartel that excludes new competitors. For all the above reasons, patent pools ...

Are patent pools a way to help patent owners enforce their rights ? 1

This paper explores empirically the interplay between patent pooling and litigations using data on 1,564 United States patents belonging to eight different pools and to a control database with patents having the same characteristics. We investigate two main questions. We first assess whether the entry in a pool fosters the patents’ enforcement. Our analysis makes it possible to highlight variou...

Patent Premium in Countries with Weak Intellectual Property Rights Protection

Given the high opportunity cost of patenting in countries with weak intellectual property right (IPR) protection, it is paradoxical to observe an increase of patenting activities by multinational corporations and indigenous companies in some of those countries in the past decade. We undertake a large-scale firm-level study in the context of China (an emerging economy with weak IPR protection) t...