Standard Setting, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Role of Antitrust in Regulating Incomplete Contracts

Tsai, Joanna; Wright, Joshua D.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2467939

Cited by 16 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…SSO patent policies, far from being static documents, are amended and adapted with some regularity. Tsai and Wright (2015) find that many SSOs amend their patent policies as frequently as once per year or more. Most of these amendments, however, are not significant.…”

Section: Sso Policy Evolution and Amendmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She finds that while the first two concerns (patent ambush and royalty rates) have largely been addressed by the SSOs studied, the last two concerns (patent transfer and injunctions), which have emerged more recently, have not yet been addressed fully. Tsai and Wright (2015) study SSO policy amendments pertaining to licensing rules and disclosure at 11 SSOs. They rate the amendments based on their reduction of ambiguity in policy language (significant reduction, moderate reduction, no reduction, increase in ambiguity) and find a gradual reduction in policy ambiguity across the board.…”

Section: Sso Policy Evolution and Amendmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Technical standards, standards-setting organizations, and intellectual property: a survey of the literature (with an emphasis on empirical approaches)

Contreras

2019

Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law

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Section: Sso Policy Evolution and Amendmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sso Policy Evolution and Amendmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Technical standards, standards-setting organizations, and intellectual property: a survey of the literature (with an emphasis on empirical approaches)

Contreras

2019

Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law

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“…Changes in voting rules and membership of SSOs may provide information about the quality of the innovation represented by technology standards. Tsai and Wright (2015) consider SSO IP policies and find that changes over time are consistent with a competitive contracting process and diversity of technology adopters and contributors to the standard.…”

Section: Empirical Implications Of the Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Standard Setting Organisations and Standard Essential Patents: Voting and Markets

Spulber¹

2018

The Economic Journal

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The analysis provides conditions under which standard setting organisations (SSOs) choose efficient technology standards. I introduce a two-stage game with both voting and market competition. In equilibrium, standards and market outcomes are efficient even with market power from scarce capacity and standard essential patents (SEPs). I show that a drastic innovation with SEPs generates greater social welfare than a less efficient standard without SEPs. A key finding is that voting power and market power have counterbalancing effects. The discussion helps explain empirical observation of differences in SSO voting rules, intellectual property (IP) rules, membership and alliances.How do standard setting organisations (SSOs) affect economic efficiency? Answering this question requires understanding interactions between voting in SSOs and market competition. I introduce a two-stage model in which inventors and adopters in an SSO vote on standards in the first stage and then compete in the market in the second stage. I obtain conditions under which SSOs choose efficient technology standards and the resulting market outcomes are efficient. I find that voting power and market power have countervailing effects. Standards and market outcomes are efficient because market prices harmonise relative benefits even if the relative benefits of standards for individual adopters differ both within and across industry groups. Also, when standards represent significant innovations, the social benefits of efficient standards outweigh the economic effects of standard essential patents (SEPs).

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“…Moreover, the large selection effects that we find in our cross-sectional and difference-in-differences models suggest that many dSEPs would have a relatively high litigation rate even if they were not incorporated into a standard, and we cannot disprove the claim that time-varying unobserved factors may be driving both disclosures and litigation. Nevertheless, if one considers SSO intellectual property policies through a contractual lens, our belief is that both the high overall dispute rate and the positive correlation between disclosure and litigation tend to undermine any presumption that these contracts are "optimally incomplete" as some observers have suggested (e.g., Tsai and Wright, 2015).…”

Section: Litigation Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disclosure Rules and Declared Essential Patents

et al. 2017

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Many standard setting organizations (SSOs) require participants to disclose patents that might be infringed by implementing a proposed standard, and commit to license their "essential" patents on terms that are at least fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND). Data from these SSO intellectual property disclosures have been used in academic studies to provide a window into the standard setting process, and in legal proceedings to assess parties' relative contributions to a standard. We develop a simple model of the disclosure process to illustrate the link between SSO rules and patent-holder incentives, and examine some of the model's predictions using a novel dataset constructed from the disclosure archives of thirteen major SSOs. The central message of the paper is that subtle differences in the rules used by different SSOs can influence which patents are disclosed, the terms of licensing commitments, and ultimately long-run citation and litigation rates for the underlying patents.

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Standard Setting, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Role of Antitrust in Regulating Incomplete Contracts

Cited by 16 publications

References 24 publications

Technical standards, standards-setting organizations, and intellectual property: a survey of the literature (with an emphasis on empirical approaches)

Technical standards, standards-setting organizations, and intellectual property: a survey of the literature (with an emphasis on empirical approaches)

Standard Setting Organisations and Standard Essential Patents: Voting and Markets

Disclosure Rules and Declared Essential Patents

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