| Abstract: |
This thesis comprises three chapters with the patent litigation as a central
theme. The first chapter develops a methodology to compare the quality of
patent litigation systems in six major economies: United States, United
Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Korea, China. Quality is defined as whether it
provides a fair and just legal environment for nullifying weak patents and
adjudicating infringement actions. Ultimately, this study presents
heterogeneity in the quality of the sample systems. Litigation systems with
rigorous and predictable adjudication have a low risk of opportunistic and
anti-competitive filings.In the second paper (Chapter 2), I explore the
relationship between technology ownership frag- mentation and the opposition
filing in European Patent Office (EPO). I develop a two-stages game, in which
opposition can be used for an ex ante negotiation (e.g. licensing). The
framework presents that high litigation risk happens under two kinds of
conditions: when the ownership to external technologies is highly
concentrated, profit dissipation is over the licensing revenue for the
potential licensee; when the ownership to external technologies is widely
fragmented, transaction cost is high for the entrance. That is, the
opposition, replacing the licensing, will be frequently used. To empirically
test this hypothesis, we use a data set that covers patent opposition cases
during the period 1985-2005, and construct application-based “fragmentation
index”. Finally, regression results confirm that opposition likelihood
displays an U-shape re- lationship with the number of potential technology
suppliers. Besides, the effect of ownership patterns is stronger in discrete
product industries. This analysis controls for differences in filing, granted
rate and other technological observed characteristics. Results are robust to
alternative estimation strategies that account for over-dispersion in the
patent counts data and industry heterogeneity.The third paper proposes that
system designs influence the incidence of patent litigation risk. I construct
three one-to-one matching data sets by total 2748 European patents, which
includes 916 patents without any challenge, 916 patents having been challenged
in the opposition at the European Patent Office (EPO), and 916 having been
challenged in Germany Federal Patent Court (BPatG). the EPO and the BPatG
follow different procedures to reexamine, amend or revoke a granted decision.
To explore different filing patterns in two litigation systems, I provide a
much more rigorous definition to describe patent quality: Novelty, Unique,
Impact, which has been operationalized and utilized in the technological
radicalness literature. By comparing litigated cases to control groups, I find
a high degree of significance between opposition risk and ex ante-identifiable
factors - Novelty, while a high degree of significance between invalidation
trials and ex post indicator of technological radicalness - Impact. Moreover,
I also confirm that the filing in the opposition is less constrained with
firm’s patent portfolios and technological conditions. |