1. Michael Risch has published a paper titled (Un)Reasonable Royalties, 98 Boston University Law Review 187 (2018). Here is a link to the paper, and here is the abstract:
Though reasonable royalty damages are ubiquitous in patent litigation, they are only a hundred years old. But in that time they have become deeply misunderstood. This Article returns to the development and origins of reasonable royalties, exploring both why and how courts originally assessed them.
It then turns a harsh eye toward all that we think we know about reasonable royalties. No current belief is safe from criticism, from easy targets such as the twenty-five percent “rule of thumb” to fundamental dogma such as the hypothetical negotiation. In short, this Article concludes that we are doing it wrong, and have been for some time.
This Article is agnostic as to outcome; departure from traditional methods can and has led to both overcompensation and undercompensation. But it challenges those who support departure from historic norms—all while citing cases from the same period—to justify new rules, many of which fail any economic justification.
2. Tim Simcoe and Mark Lemley have posted a paper on ssrn titled How Essential Are Standard-Essential Patents? Here is a link, and here is the abstract:
Courts, commentators, and companies have devoted enormous time and energy to the problem of standard-essential patents (SEPs) – patents that cover (or at least are claimed to cover) industry standards. With billions of dollars at stake, there has been a great deal of litigation and even more lobbying and writing about problems such as how if at all standard-setting organizations (SSOs) should limit enforcement of patent rights, whether a promise to license SEPs on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms is enforceable in court or in arbitration, what a FRAND royalty is, and whether a refusal to comply with a FRAND commitment violates the antitrust laws.
In this study, we explore what happens when SEPs go to court. What we found surprised us. We expected that proving infringement of a SEP would be easy – they are, after all, supposed to be essential – but that the breadth of the patents might make them invalid. In fact, the evidence shows the opposite. SEPs are more likely to be held valid than a matched set of litigated non-SEP patents, but they are significantly less likely to be infringed. Standard-essential patents, then, don’t seem to be all that essential, at least when they make it to court.
At least part of the explanation for this surprising result comes from another one of our findings: many SEPs asserted in court are asserted by non-practicing entities (NPEs), also known as patent trolls. NPEs do much worse in court, even when they assert SEPs. And the fact that they have acquired a large number of the SEPs enforced in court may bring the overall win rate down significantly.
Our results have interesting implications for the policy debates over both SEPs and NPEs. Standard-essential patents may not be so essential after all, perhaps because companies tend to err on the size of over-disclosing patents that may or may not be essential. The failure of NPEs to win cases even with what seem like they should be a strong set of patents raises interesting questions about the role of NPEs in patent law and the policy efforts to curb patent litigation abuse.
3. Dan Spulber has posted a paper on ssrn titled Finding Reasonable Royalty Damages: A Contract Approach to Patent Infringement. Here's a link, and here's the abstract:
The article introduces a contract approach to patent infringement and develops a methodology for finding reasonable royalty damages. The contract approach complements approaches based on property and tort, thus providing a more complete understanding of damages. The article argues that the patent infringement case should specify an informed contract. The informed contract improves estimation of damages by taking into account information revealed during the period of infringement. The article introduces a market value method for calculating reasonable royalty damages based on patent transfer prices. The contract approach helps calculate reasonable royalty damages based on royalties in comparable patent licenses. The contract approach addresses various controversies over reasonable royalty damages.
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