IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/10778.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard Setting

In: Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 1

Author

Listed:
  • Carl Shapiro

Abstract

In several key industries, including semiconductors, biotechnology, computer software, and the Internet, our patent system is creating a patent thicket: an overlapping set of patent rights requiring that those seeking to commercialize new technology obtain licenses from multiple patentees. The patent thicket is especially thorny when combined with the risk of hold-up, namely the danger that new products will inadvertently infringe on patents issued after these products were designed. The need to navigate the patent thicket and hold-up is especially pronounced in industries such as telecommunications and computing in which formal standard-setting is a core part of bringing new technologies to market. Cross-licenses and patent pools are two natural and effective methods used by market participants to cut through the patent thicket, but each involves some transaction costs. Antitrust law and enforcement, with its historical hostility to cooperation among horizontal rivals, can easily add to these transaction costs. Yet a few relatively simple principles, such as the desirability package licensing for complementary patents but not for substitute patents, can go a long way towards insuring that antitrust will help solve the problems caused by the patent thicket and by hold-up rather than exacerbating them.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Carl Shapiro, 2001. "Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard Setting," NBER Chapters, in: Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 1, pages 119-150, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:10778
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c10778.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kortum, Samuel & Lerner, Josh, 1998. "Stronger protection or technological revolution: what is behind the recent surge in patenting?," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 247-304, June.
    2. Bronwyn H. Hall and Marie Ham., 1999. "The Patent Paradox Revisited: Determinants of Patenting in the US Semiconductor Industry, 1980-94," Economics Working Papers E99-268, University of California at Berkeley.
    3. Michael L. Katz & Carl Shapiro, 1985. "On the Licensing of Innovations," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 16(4), pages 504-520, Winter.
    4. R. Schmalensee & R. Willig (ed.), 1989. "Handbook of Industrial Organization," Handbook of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 2, number 2.
    5. Wesley M. Cohen & Richard R. Nelson & John P. Walsh, 2000. "Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)," NBER Working Papers 7552, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Michael L. Katz & Carl Shapiro, 1994. "Systems Competition and Network Effects," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 8(2), pages 93-115, Spring.
    7. Richard Gilbert & Carl Shapiro, 1997. "Antitrust Issues in the Licensing of Intellectual Property: The Nine No-No's Meet the Nineties," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 28(1997 Micr), pages 283-349.
    8. Shapiro, Carl, 1989. "Theories of oligopoly behavior," Handbook of Industrial Organization, in: R. Schmalensee & R. Willig (ed.), Handbook of Industrial Organization, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 6, pages 329-414, Elsevier.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Shapiro, Carl, 2003. "Antitrust Limits to Patent Settlements," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 34(2), pages 391-411, Summer.
    2. Belleflamme,Paul & Peitz,Martin, 2015. "Industrial Organization," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107687899, September.
    3. Dutz,Mark Andrew, 1991. "Firm output adjustment to trade liberalization : theory with application to the Moroccan experience," Policy Research Working Paper Series 602, The World Bank.
    4. Illoong Kwon, 2008. "Patent Portfolio Race and Secrecy," Discussion Papers 08-05, University at Albany, SUNY, Department of Economics.
    5. Shapiro, Carl, 2002. "The FTC's Challenge to Intel's Cross-Licensing Practices," Competition Policy Center, Working Paper Series qt9756j0km, Competition Policy Center, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    6. Kaplow, Louis & Shapiro, Carl, 2007. "Antitrust," Handbook of Law and Economics, in: A. Mitchell Polinsky & Steven Shavell (ed.), Handbook of Law and Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 15, pages 1073-1225, Elsevier.
    7. Stavins, Robert & Jaffe, Adam & Newell, Richard, 2000. "Technological Change and the Environment," Working Paper Series rwp00-002, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    8. Kovác, Eugen & Vinogradov, Viatcheslav & Zigic, Kresimir, 2010. "Technological leadership and persistence of monopoly under endogenous entry: Static versus dynamic analysis," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 34(8), pages 1421-1441, August.
    9. Herbert Hovenkamp, 2011. "Harm to Competition Under the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 39(1), pages 3-18, August.
    10. Andrey V. Makarov, 2014. "Comparative Analusis Of Antitrust Policy Against Collusion In Some Transition Economies: Challenges For Effectiveness," HSE Working papers WP BRP 20/PA/2014, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    11. Jingang Zhao, 2009. "Necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimal number of firms," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 98(3), pages 235-246, December.
    12. Ajay Bhaskarabhatla & Enrico Pennings, 2012. "Defensive Disclosure under Antitrust Enforcement," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 12-010/2, Tinbergen Institute.
    13. Marcus Wagner, 2007. "The Link between Environmental Innovation, Patents, and Environmental Management," DRUID Working Papers 07-14, DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies.
    14. Luís Cabral, 2018. "We’re Number 1: Price Wars for Market Share Leadership," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(5), pages 2013-2030, May.
    15. Neary, J Peter & Leahy, Dermot, 2000. "Strategic Trade and Industrial Policy towards Dynamic Oligopolies," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 110(463), pages 484-508, April.
    16. Bronwyn H. Hall, 2005. "Exploring the Patent Explosion," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 30(2_2), pages 35-48, January.
    17. Grandner, Thomas, 2001. "Unions in oligopolistic, vertically connected industries," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(9), pages 1723-1740, October.
    18. Grandner, Thomas, 1996. "Is wage-leadership an instrument to coordinate unions' wage-policy? The case of imperfect product markets," Department of Economics Working Paper Series 42, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    19. Höffler, Felix & Kranz, Sebastian, 2011. "Legal unbundling can be a golden mean between vertical integration and ownership separation," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 29(5), pages 576-588, September.
    20. Giovanni Dosi & Luigi Marengo & Corrado Pasquali, 2010. "How Much Should Society Fuel the Greed of Innovators? On the Relations between Appropriability, Opportunities and Rates of Innovation," Chapters, in: Riccardo Viale & Henry Etzkowitz (ed.), The Capitalization of Knowledge, chapter 4, Edward Elgar Publishing.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K2 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law
    • L4 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:10778. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.