Approximating the Standard Essentiality of Patents - A Semantics-Based Analysis

Abstract

Standard-essential patents (SEPs) have become a key element of technical coordination in standard-setting organizations. Yet, in many cases, it remains unclear whether a declared SEP is truly standard-essential. To date, there is no automated procedure that allows for a scalable and objective assessment of SEP status. This paper introduces a semantics-based method for approximating the standard essentiality of patents. We provide details on the procedure that generates the measure of standard essentiality and present the results of several validation exercises. In a first empirical application we illustrate the measure's usefulness in estimating the share of true SEPs in firm patent portfolios for several mobile telecommunication standards. We find firm-level differences that are statistically significant and economically substantial. Furthermore, we observe a general decline in the average share of true SEPs between successive standard generations.

Truly standard‐essential patents? A semantics‐based analysis

“…4646In fact, small‐scale evidence suggests that semantic similarity also predicts true essentiality for SEPs declared at IEEE and ITU‐T (Brachtendorf et al, 2020). …”

“…However, there are some subtle differences in how to interpret them.Whereas the former can be considered as a measure independent from other patents and comparable across standards, the similarity rank provides the standard-specific order of the most similar patents.26 The similarity data are freely available to researchers as part of the Semantic similarity of patent-standard pairs (ETSI, IEEE, and ITUT) database: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/B2RJSX. For more information on the database, seeBrachtendorf et al (2020).27 We focus on all patents with a similarity score of at least 0.6 and a similarity rank of 5 or lower. We further restrict the set of patents to those that have at least one family member granted at the EPO or the USPTO, because patent holders are unlikely to declare rejected patent applications as SEPs.28 At the same time, more than 80% of the non-SEPs are part of patent portfolios with at least one declared SEP.…”

“…2626The similarity data are freely available to researchers as part of the Semantic similarity of patent–standard pairs (ETSI, IEEE, and ITUT) database : https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/B2RJSX. For more information on the database, see Brachtendorf et al (2020). …”

Patenting inventions or inventing patents? Continuation practice at the USPTO

“…Brachtendorf et al (2019) pursues a similar approach based on automated text analysis.47 We do not have strong priors as to whether the claims in a continuation would be "broader" or "narrower" than the claims in its parent: this likely depends on the (unobserved) relationship of the original claims to the standard. For this reason, we do not analyze text-based measures of claim scope.48 We use all the families of SEPs in our data and adapt the procedure described inArts et al (2018) to extract a set of unique keywords from the claims of each application.…”