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Sunday, October 21, 2007

Injunctive Relief and Non-Practising Patent Holders

Several scholars have released a paper on property and liability rules in patent infringement cases- Denicolò, Vincenzo, Geradin, Damien, Layne-Farrar, Anne and Padilla, A. Jorge, "Revisiting Injunctive Relief in High-Tech Industries with Non-Practicing Patent Holders (September 2007).

Injunctive relief is at the center of the intellectual property debate over market power abuse. Some scholars, with fears of patent holdup and royalty stacking in mind, have advocated limiting the right to obtain an injunction. In particular, some have called for categorical denials of injunctions for any “non-practicing” patent holder or whenever the patent in question is but one component of a larger, complex product incorporating multiple patented technologies.

...we examine the injunctive relief policy proposals using an error cost framework. We find the theory these proposals rest upon to be overly restrictive and therefore likely to result in substantial “false positives”, where patent holders with no designs of patent holdup are nonetheless denied injunctive relief. Moreover, the available empirical evidence does not support the position that patent holdup and royalty stacking are pervasive enough problems to warrant significant policy reform.

...we argue that the recent Supreme Court eBay decision can and should be read as a return to a balancing test, where costs and benefits are weighed carefully before granting or denying a patent injunction.

This is important and timely research.

posted by Noel Le @ 11:58 AM | Academia , Patents

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