AIPPI: Quantification of Monetary Relief

The AIPPI World Congress will be meeting October 13-17 in Sydney.  (Webpage here.)  One session on Monday, October 16 will be on injunctions in pharmaceutical patent cases, and another on Tuesday, October 17 is titled "How Much for Your FRAND?"  Perhaps of most interest to readers of this blog, however, there will be a Study Committee Meeting on Saturday, October 14 titled "Quantification of Monetary Relief" and on Sunday, October 15 a "Plenary Session for proposed Resolution (4) - Quantification of monetary relief."  The description of the October 14 session is as follows:

In litigation concerning infringement of IP rights, monetary relief in the form of damages is commonly requested by the IP rights holder. It is generally accepted that this relief should at a minimum be adequate to compensate for the loss suffered by the rights holder and deter further infringement. In practice, few cases proceed beyond a determination of liability and courts are asked to determine the quantum of damages relatively infrequently.  However, if a case does proceed to that stage, it may in practice be difficult to obtain economic evidence regarding infringement, and to estimate the appropriate quantum of damages to be awarded within the factual matrix of the dispute before the court.  For example, where permanent price erosion has occurred, or other irreparable harm has occurred, the relevant quantum of damages can be very difficult to determine.  Predictable and logical rules for quantification are desirable as this allows the parties to have a reasonably clear idea of the likely quantum of damage, which may in turn encourage early settlement.  Otherwise, the amount of any damages award may vary significantly from one country to another, irrespective of the size of the market. Reports have been received from a number of National and Regional Groups on the issue of quantification, and the objective is to synthesise a number of common rules on the quantification of monetary relief that could be applied in a uniform way, promoting legal certainty. 

It will be interesting to see what resolution comes out of the meeting.  The individual country reports prepared in advance of the meeting--forty of them, ranging alphabetically from Argentina to Vietnam--are available here.  (I haven't read many of them yet myself.)  The Japan report is also available in the July 2017 issue of AIPPI-Journal of the Japanese Group of AIPPI (pp. 217-28), and the Germany report in the August-September 2017 issue of GRUR-Int. (pp. 736-43).