Some New Papers on Damages, Part 2

1.  Fernando J. Leiva Bertran and John L. Turner have posted a paper on ssrn titled Welfare-Optimal Royalty Damages Under Quantity Competition with Multiple Infringement.  Here's a link and here's the abstract:

We study the effect of patent royalty damages on social welfare in an entry model of quantity competition. We show that fixed royalties are more effective than per-unit royalties in mitigating the inappropriability problem and promoting social welfare. Intuitively, per-unit royalties help overcome the over-entry problem only by distorting downstream competition, while fixed royalties do not. Welfare-optimal fixed royalties reflect the well-known business stealing effect of market entry. Such royalties may be useful in designing minimums for courts to use when determining reasonable royalties.

2.  Jonathan Putnam and Tim A. Williams have posted a paper on ssrn titled The Smallest Salable Patent-Practicing Unit:  Theory and Evidence.  Here is a link to the paper, and here is the abstract:

In the recent past, U.S. courts have begun to require that litigating parties base patent infringement damages on sales of the “smallest salable patent-practicing unit,” or SSPPU, in an effort to constrain the patentee’s damages claim to the true “economic footprint” of the invention. We ask whether this legal requirement can be grounded in economic theory, industry licensing practices, or the scope of actual patent claims. We find significant theoretical reasons to reject the mandatory imposition of the SSPPU rule, because the economic impact of an invention is not, in general, limited to the sales price of an input that allegedly embodies it. In the telecommunications industry, where the SSPPU rule has assumed additional policy significance in the context of FRAND commitments by owners of standard-essential patents (SEPs), we find overwhelming evidence that: (1) major licensors and licensees reject the ostensible SSPPU — the baseband processor — as a royalty metering device, regardless of their place in the supply chain; and (2) for one representative patent portfolio, the scope of the claims cannot be limited to the baseband processor itself. In short, we find that the pricing of telecommunications inventions is not limited to the “smallest” component, nor are such components necessarily “salable,” or “patent-practicing.”