Patent Quality and Litigation Settlement: The case of NPEs in the US.

• Main Authors: Ting-Yu Chou, 周庭宇
• Other Authors: Show-Ling Jang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/rf39ar

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 經濟學研究所 === 107 === Non-practicing entities (NPEs) are often regarded as notorious characters in the intellectual property. They assert patent infringement, bringing massive cost of lawsuits for defendant firms, but end up seeking the nuisance value settlement. Previous studies found that the settlement rate of NPEs wasn’t significantly higher than PEs; however, they haven’t had constructed a comprehensive empirical model to consider in the effects of NPEs types, nor the quality of asserted patents on the settlement rates. In this article, we collected 2,456 patent infringement suits, asserted by either PEs or NPEs, during 2010 and used Firth Logistic Regression model to examine the impact of NPEs types and patent quality, such like MLPs (Most-litigated Patents) rate and number of claims, on the settlement rate, while controlling the fixed effect of judge, plaintiff’s attorney and other conditions. Our result indicates that: (1) Only among the infringement suits asserted by University and Failed Operating Company (both are R&D oriented NPEs), the patent quality is positively correlated with settlement rate. (2) To most of PEs and NPEs, the higher proportion of MLPs within all the asserted patents in one case, the lower settlement rate it may be. However, among the suits by Individual Inventor and Patent Holding Company, the proportion of MLPs ratio within asserted patents is negatively correlated with the settlement rate. It shows that the type of NPEs and the quality of asserted patents do affect the settlement rate of patent infringement lawsuits in different ways.