Clarkson (2004) - Objective Identification Of Patent Thickets A Network Analytic Approach

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  • Clarkson, G. (2004), "Objective Identification of Patent Thickets: A Network Analytic Approach," Harvard Business School Doctoral Thesis
@article{clarkson2004objective,
  title={Objective Identification of Patent Thickets: A Network Analytic Approach},
  author={Clarkson, G.},
  journal={Harvard Business School Doctoral Thesis},
  year={2004},
  abstract={When organizations in technology industries attempt to advance their innovative activities, they almost always must be cognizant of the intellectual property rights of others. When further innovation is thwarted, however, the situation can be described as a patent thicket. Although the term “patent thicket” seems to have originated in litigation in the 1970s regarding Xerox’s dominance of a portion of the photocopier industry,1 economist Carl Shapiro reintroduced the term in academic discourse in 2000. Shapiro defines a patent thicket more broadly to encompass the intellectual property portfolios of several companies that form “a dense web of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology,” and he points out that “with cumulative innovation and multiple blocking patents, … patent rights can have the perverse effect of stifling, not encouraging, innovation” (2000, pg. 120). Despite all that has been written about patent thickets,2 an objective methodology for verifying the existence of a patent thicket has never been developed. Throughout the last 150 years, however, organizations have stumbled into a number of patent thickets and have occasionally responded by constructing patent pools, which this paper defines as organizational structures where multiple firms collectively aggregate patent rights into a package for licensing, either among themselves or to any potential licensees irrespective of membership in the pool. Such collaboration among technologically competing firms, however, has often encountered difficulty from an antitrust standpoint, even if the formation of the pool is pro-competitive. While the existence of a patent thicket is a necessary but insufficient condition for demonstrating that a given collection of patents is a pro-competitive solution to a particular patent thicket problem, the antitrust regime has never had an objective method of verifying the existence of a patent thicket in a given section of patent space. In response to the lack of such a methodology, this paper proposes a tool to facilitate objectively demonstrating the existence of patent thickets.},
  discipline={Econ, Law},
  research_type={Measures},
  industry={},
  thicket_stance={},
  thicket_stance_extract={},
  thicket_def={},
  thicket_def_extract={},  
  tags={}, 
  filename={Clarkson (2004) - Objective Identification Of Patent Thickets A Network Analytic Approach.pdf}
}

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Abstract

When organizations in technology industries attempt to advance their innovative activities, they almost always must be cognizant of the intellectual property rights of others. When further innovation is thwarted, however, the situation can be described as a patent thicket. Although the term “patent thicket” seems to have originated in litigation in the 1970s regarding Xerox’s dominance of a portion of the photocopier industry,1 economist Carl Shapiro reintroduced the term in academic discourse in 2000. Shapiro defines a patent thicket more broadly to encompass the intellectual property portfolios of several companies that form “a dense web of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology,” and he points out that “with cumulative innovation and multiple blocking patents, … patent rights can have the perverse effect of stifling, not encouraging, innovation” (2000, pg. 120). Despite all that has been written about patent thickets,2 an objective methodology for verifying the existence of a patent thicket has never been developed. Throughout the last 150 years, however, organizations have stumbled into a number of patent thickets and have occasionally responded by constructing patent pools, which this paper defines as organizational structures where multiple firms collectively aggregate patent rights into a package for licensing, either among themselves or to any potential licensees irrespective of membership in the pool. Such collaboration among technologically competing firms, however, has often encountered difficulty from an antitrust standpoint, even if the formation of the pool is pro-competitive. While the existence of a patent thicket is a necessary but insufficient condition for demonstrating that a given collection of patents is a pro-competitive solution to a particular patent thicket problem, the antitrust regime has never had an objective method of verifying the existence of a patent thicket in a given section of patent space. In response to the lack of such a methodology, this paper proposes a tool to facilitate objectively demonstrating the existence of patent thickets.

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