Private agreements for coordinating patent rights: the case of patent pools

Nancy Gallini ()

ECONOMIA E POLITICA INDUSTRIALE, 2011, vol. 2011/3, issue 3, 5-30

Abstract: Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate complementary, valid and essential patents as having pro-competitive benefits in reducing prices, transactions costs, and the incidence of legal suits. Since patent pools are cooperative agreements, they also have the potential of suppressing competition if, for example, they harbor weak or invalid patents, dampen incentives to conduct research on innovations that compete with the pooled patents, foreclose competition from downstream product or upstream input markets, or soften competition with outside substitutes that do not rely on the pooled patents. In synthesizing the ideas advanced in the economic literature, this paper explores whether these antitrust concerns apply to pools with complementary patents and, if they do, the implications for competition policy to constrain them.

Keywords: Propriet? intellettuale; brevetti; politica antitrust/sulla concorrenza; accordi cooperativi (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 L24 L4 L44 O3 O33 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/Scheda_Rivista. ... 048&Tipo=ArticoloPDF (text/html)
Single articles can be downloaded buying download credits, for info: https://www.francoangeli.it/DownloadCredit

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fan:polipo:v:html10.3280/poli2011-003001

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.francoang ... io.aspx?IDRivista=13

Access Statistics for this article

ECONOMIA E POLITICA INDUSTRIALE is currently edited by FrancoAngeli

More articles in ECONOMIA E POLITICA INDUSTRIALE from FrancoAngeli Editore
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stefania Rosato ().