Rudi Bekkers

Managing intellectual property using patent pools : lessons from three generations of pools in the optical disc industry.

For modern technologies, access to intellectual property rights (IPR) is complex because it is fragmented among many owners. The required licensing agreements invoke considerable transaction costs and royalty stacking. Often, it is in the interest of the technology sponsor to ease access to the required IPR. Patent pools have proven useful to achieve this goal. This article examines the experiences with three generations of patent pools in the optical disc industry. Technology platforms are becoming increasingly complex, which leads to a fragmentation of IPR among many pools and causes new issues. A novel “pool-of-pools” can address these.

Just-in-time inventions and the development of standards: How firms use opportunistic strategies to obtain standard-essential patents (SEPs)

Recent years have seen large-scale litigation of standard-essential patents (SEPs) between companies like Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, Google, HTC, Microsoft, Kodak, and Research in Motion. Such patents are particular because they are, by definition, indispensable to any company wishing to implement a technical standard. Such patents bring substantial benefits to their owners and firms that do not have such patents in their own portfolio are sometimes prepared to spend billions of dollars purchasing them and/or signing a license agreement with each of the owners. In addition, the owners have other benefits in financial returns (Blind et al., 2011) and stock market returns (Aggarwal et al., 2011). Thus, firms have huge incentives to obtain essential patents. While there is already a considerable body of literature on the possible effects of SEP ownership on competition (e.g. patent holdup, royalty stacking), not much work has yet been done on how firms obtain such patents in the first place. Notable exceptions are the studies of Omachi (2004), who shows how firms use patent continuations to extend the scope of existing patents in order to make them essential to the standard.

Where patents and standards come together

This chapter examines the history and context of standardization and patenting. It begins by looking at how the discussion arose as to the relationship between patents and standards, and how this topic became more prominent on the agenda of companies, standard setting organizations, and regulators. It then looks at the empirical facts about patents in standards, focusing on standard-essential patents to describe how this phenomenon developed over time, but also how it is distributed among technology areas, standard setting organizations and specific standards. Concerns and problems are identified that could arise when patented technology is included in standards, leading to a discussion of patent policies in standard setting organizations. Likely reasons are identified as to why companies encounter more frequent conflicts over patents in standards, and a range of policy measures are examined.

Gender and doubts about a study in technology : a Dutch-Hungarian comparison

Abstract A cross-cultural investigation of the doubts of male and female students in technology about their academic programs was conducted. Data were gathered from 477 students of two universities, one in Hungary and the other in the Netherlands. An exploratory model was developed, based on concepts from Eccless (1987) model of educational choice and Tintos (1975) model of educational dropout. The expectation that female students and Hungarian students have more doubts, because of differences in reasons for doubt, was confirmed. Incongruency of study program and personal interests appeared to be a more important reason for doubt for Hungarian students than for Dutch students. Female students mentioned difficulty of study as a more important reason for doubt than male students did.

Selected Quantitative Studies of Patents in Standards

After an introduction into the principle data and methodology, this study starts by providing a quantitative overview of the general features of standard essential patents (also called SEPs). It considers the occurrence of essential patents, how their existence has developed over time, and how essential patents are distributed among SSOs, technology areas, standards, and owners (including their business models). It also considers the legal status of such patents, for example whether they are actually enforceable. The study continues with an analysis on how SEPs differ from ‘regular’ patents. To make a fair comparison, a matched control set of patents was developed. We consider and compare the citation performance, the family size, and the patent grant likelihood. The final four chapters of the study focus on a set of specific topics: (1) ‘blanket disclosures’, (2) essential patent transfer, (3) patent pools, and (4) and litigation.

Showcase: A database for standards and patents

Disclosure of essential patents at standard-setting organizations provides a rich source of information that can be used for various research questions related to standards and innovation. Yet this data also has some limitations and its compilation and preparation create challenges. This paper summarizes a number of recent studies using this type of data and discusses recent efforts to create an open database.