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 various factors that help patent pool members enforce their Intellectual Property Rights. We find that the pools’ size, as measured by the number of members, has a positive effect on litigations. We argue that this effect could be due to a transmission of information between members and, thus, increases the likelihood that the patent owner will detect the infringement. We emphasize and discuss such other factors that affect the incentives to litigate as the size of the firm and whether the patent holder is vertically integrated. Second, we underscore that the patent inclusion in a pool, by reducing the uncertainty on the patent essentiality, facilitates dispute resolution by settlement. 1 Richard Gilbert, Aija Leiponen, Frederico Etro, Stéphane Caprice, Marc Bourreau, François Lévèque and Yann Ménière provided support and comments. This paper has also benefitted from comments by participants of the sixth bi-annual conference on The Economics of Intellectual Property, Software and the Internet, Toulouse School of Economics and the fifth Intertic conference. 2 Associate research fellow, Cerna, Mines ParisTech, [email protected]