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Unpacking the Flawed 2021 Draft USPTO, NIST, & DOJ Policy Statement on Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs)

Geoffrey Manne — 8 February 2022

Responding to a new draft policy statement from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) regarding remedies for infringement of standard-essential patents (SEPs), a group of 19 distinguished law, economics, and business scholars convened by the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) submitted comments arguing that the guidance would improperly tilt the balance of power between implementers and inventors, and could undermine incentives for innovation.

As explained in the scholars’ comments, the draft policy statement misunderstands many aspects of patent and antitrust policy. The draft notably underestimates the value of injunctions and the circumstances in which they are a necessary remedy. It also overlooks important features of the standardization process that make opportunistic behavior much less likely than policymakers typically recognize. These points are discussed in even more detail in previous work by ICLE scholars, including here and here.

These first-order considerations are only the tip of the iceberg, however. Patent policy has a huge range of second-order effects that the draft policy statement and policymakers more generally tend to overlook. Indeed, reducing patent protection has more detrimental effects on economic welfare than the conventional wisdom typically assumes.

The comments highlight three important areas affected by SEP policy that would be undermined by the draft statement.

First, SEPs are established through an industry-wide, collaborative process that develops and protects innovations considered essential to an industry’s core functioning. This process enables firms to specialize in various functions throughout an industry, rather than vertically integrate to ensure compatibility.
Second, strong patent protection, especially of SEPs, boosts startup creation via a broader set of mechanisms than is typically recognized.
Finally, strong SEP protection is essential to safeguard U.S. technology leadership and sovereignty.

As explained in the scholars’ comments, the draft policy statement would be detrimental on all three of these dimensions.

To be clear, the comments do not argue that addressing these secondary effects should be a central focus of patent and antitrust policy. Instead, the point is that policymakers must deal with a far more complex set of issues than is commonly recognized; the effects of SEP policy aren’t limited to the allocation of rents among inventors and implementers (as they are sometimes framed in policy debates). Accordingly, policymakers should proceed with caution and resist the temptation to alter by fiat terms that have emerged through careful negotiation among inventors and implementers, and which have been governed for centuries by the common law of contract.

Collaborative Standard-Setting and Specialization as Substitutes for Proprietary Standards and Vertical Integration

Intellectual property in general—and patents, more specifically—is often described as a means to increase the monetary returns from the creation and distribution of innovations. While this is undeniably the case, this framing overlooks the essential role that IP also plays in promoting specialization throughout the economy.

As Ronald Coase famously showed in his Nobel-winning work, firms must constantly decide whether to perform functions in-house (by vertically integrating), or contract them out to third parties (via the market mechanism). Coase concluded that these decisions hinge on whether the transaction costs associated with the market mechanism outweigh the cost of organizing production internally. Decades later, Oliver Williamson added a key finding to this insight. He found that among the most important transaction costs that firms encounter are those that stem from incomplete contracts and the scope for opportunistic behavior they entail.

This leads to a simple rule of thumb: as the scope for opportunistic behavior increases, firms are less likely to use the market mechanism and will instead perform tasks in-house, leading to increased vertical integration.

IP plays a key role in this process. Patents drastically reduce the transaction costs associated with the transfer of knowledge. This gives firms the opportunity to develop innovations collaboratively and without fear that trading partners might opportunistically appropriate their inventions. In turn, this leads to increased specialization. As Robert Merges observes:

Patents facilitate arms-length trade of a technology-intensive input, leading to entry and specialization.

More specifically, it is worth noting that the development and commercialization of inventions can lead to two important sources of opportunistic behavior: patent holdup and patent holdout. As the assembled scholars explain in their comments, while patent holdup has drawn the lion’s share of policymaker attention, empirical and anecdotal evidence suggest that holdout is the more salient problem.

Policies that reduce these costs—especially patent holdout—in a cost-effective manner are worthwhile, with the immediate result that technologies are more widely distributed than would otherwise be the case. Inventors also see more intense and extensive incentives to produce those technologies in the first place.

The Importance of Intellectual Property Rights for Startup Activity

Strong patent rights are essential to monetize innovation, thus enabling new firms to gain a foothold in the marketplace. As the scholars’ comments explain, this is even more true for startup companies. There are three main reasons for this:

Patent rights protected by injunctions prevent established companies from simply copying innovative startups, with the expectation that they will be able to afford court-set royalties;
Patent rights can be the basis for securitization, facilitating access to startup funding; and
Patent rights drive venture capital (VC) investment.

While point (1) is widely acknowledged, many fail to recognize it is particularly important for startup companies. There is abundant literature on firms’ appropriability mechanisms (these are essentially the strategies firms employ to prevent rivals from copying their inventions). The literature tells us that patent protection is far from the only strategy firms use to protect their inventions (see. e.g., here, here and here).

The alternative appropriability mechanisms identified by these studies tend to be easier to implement for well-established firms. For instance, many firms earn returns on their inventions by incorporating them into physical products that cannot be reverse engineered. This is much easier for firms that already have a large industry presence and advanced manufacturing capabilities. In contrast, startup companies—almost by definition—must outsource production.

Second, property rights could drive startup activity through the collateralization of IP. By offering security interests in patents, trademarks, and copyrights, startups with little or no tangible assets can obtain funding without surrendering significant equity. As Gaétan de Rassenfosse puts it:

SMEs can leverage their IP to facilitate R&D financing…. [P]atents materialize the value of knowledge stock: they codify the knowledge and make it tradable, such that they can be used as collaterals. Recent theoretical evidence by Amable et al. (2010) suggests that a systematic use of patents as collateral would allow a high growth rate of innovations despite financial constraints.

Finally, there is reason to believe intellectual-property protection is an important driver of venture capital activity. Beyond simply enabling firms to earn returns on their investments, patents might signal to potential investors that a company is successful and/or valuable. Empirical research by Hsu and Ziedonis, for instance, supports this hypothesis:

[W]e find a statistically significant and economically large effect of patent filings on investor estimates of start-up value…. A doubling in the patent application stock of a new venture [in] this sector is associated with a 28 percent increase in valuation, representing an upward funding-round adjustment of approximately $16.8 million for the average start-up in our sample.

In short, intellectual property can stimulate startup activity through various mechanisms. There is thus a sense that, at the margin, weakening patent protection will make it harder for entrepreneurs to embark on new business ventures.

The Role of Strong SEP Rights in Guarding Against China’s ‘Cyber Great Power’ Ambitions

The United States, due in large measure to its strong intellectual-property protections, is a nation of innovators, and its production of IP is one of its most important comparative advantages.

IP and its legal protections become even more important, however, when dealing with international jurisdictions, like China, that don’t offer similar levels of legal protection. By making it harder for patent holders to obtain injunctions, licensees and implementers gain the advantage in the short term, because they are able to use patented technology without having to engage in negotiations to pay the full market price.

In the case of many SEPs—particularly those in the telecommunications sector—a great many patent holders are U.S.-based, while the lion’s share of implementers are Chinese. The anti-injunction policy espoused in the draft policy statement thus amounts to a subsidy to Chinese infringers of U.S. technology.

At the same time, China routinely undermines U.S. intellectual property protections through its industrial policy. The government’s stated goal is to promote “fair and reasonable” international rules, but it is clear that China stretches its power over intellectual property around the world by granting “anti-suit injunctions” on behalf of Chinese smartphone makers, designed to curtail enforcement of foreign companies’ patent rights.

This is part of the Chinese government’s larger approach to industrial policy, which seeks to expand Chinese power in international trade negotiations and in global standards bodies. As one Chinese Communist Party official put it:

Standards are the commanding heights, the right to speak, and the right to control. Therefore, the one who obtains the standards gains the world.

Insufficient protections for intellectual property will hasten China’s objective of dominating collaborative standard development in the medium to long term. Simultaneously, this will engender a switch to greater reliance on proprietary, closed standards rather than collaborative, open standards. These harmful consequences are magnified in the context of the global technology landscape, and in light of China’s strategic effort to shape international technology standards. Chinese companies, directed by their government authorities, will gain significant control of the technologies that will underpin tomorrow’s digital goods and services.

The scholars convened by ICLE were not alone in voicing these fears. David Teece (also a signatory to the ICLE-convened comments), for example, surmises in his comments that:

The US government, in reviewing competition policy issues that might impact standards, therefore needs to be aware that the issues at hand have tremendous geopolitical consequences and cannot be looked at in isolation…. Success in this regard will promote competition and is our best chance to maintain technological leadership—and, along with it, long-term economic growth and consumer welfare and national security.

Similarly, comments from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (signed by, among others, former USPTO Director Anrei Iancu, former NIST Director Walter Copan, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre) argue that the draft policy statement would benefit Chinese firms at U.S. firms’ expense:

What is more, the largest short-term and long-term beneficiaries of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement are firms based in China. Currently, China is the world’s largest consumer of SEP-based technology, so weakening protection of American owned patents directly benefits Chinese manufacturers. The unintended effect of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement will be to support Chinese efforts to dominate critical technology standards and other advanced technologies, such as 5G. Put simply, devaluing U.S. patents is akin to a subsidized tech transfer to China.

With Chinese authorities joining standardization bodies and increasingly claiming jurisdiction over F/RAND disputes, there should be careful reevaluation of the ways the draft policy statement would further weaken the United States’ comparative advantage in IP-dependent technological innovation.

Conclusion

In short, weakening patent protection could have detrimental ramifications that are routinely overlooked by policymakers. These include increasing inventors’ incentives to vertically integrate rather than develop innovations collaboratively; reducing startup activity (especially when combined with antitrust enforcers’ newfound proclivity to challenge startup acquisitions); and eroding America’s global technology leadership, particularly with respect to China.

For these reasons (and others), the text of the draft policy statement should be reconsidered and either revised substantially to better reflect these concerns or withdrawn entirely.

The signatories to the comments are:

Alden F. Abbott	Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center George Mason University Former General Counsel, U.S. Federal Trade Commission
Jonathan Barnett	Torrey H. Webb Professor of Law University of Southern California
Ronald A. Cass	Dean Emeritus, School of Law Boston University Former Commissioner and Vice-Chairman, U.S. International Trade Commission
Giuseppe Colangelo	Jean Monnet Chair in European Innovation Policy and Associate Professor of Competition Law & Economics University of Basilicata and LUISS (Italy)
Richard A. Epstein	Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law New York University
Bowman Heiden	Executive Director, Tusher Initiative at the Haas School of Business University of California, Berkeley
Justin (Gus) Hurwitz	Professor of Law University of Nebraska
Thomas A. Lambert	Wall Chair in Corporate Law and Governance University of Missouri
Stan J. Liebowitz	Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics University of Texas at Dallas
John E. Lopatka	A. Robert Noll Distinguished Professor of Law Penn State University
Keith Mallinson	Founder and Managing Partner WiseHarbor
Geoffrey A. Manne	President and Founder International Center for Law & Economics
Adam Mossoff	Professor of Law George Mason University
Kristen Osenga	Austin E. Owen Research Scholar and Professor of Law University of Richmond
Vernon L. Smith	George L. Argyros Endowed Chair in Finance and Economics Chapman University Nobel Laureate in Economics (2002)
Daniel F. Spulber	Elinor Hobbs Distinguished Professor of International Business Northwestern University
David J. Teece	Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business University of California, Berkeley
Joshua D. Wright	University Professor of Law George Mason University Former Commissioner, U.S. Federal Trade Commission
John M. Yun	Associate Professor of Law George Mason University Former Acting Deputy Assistant Director, Bureau of Economics, U.S. Federal Trade Commission

The Problem of Data Property Rights

Dirk Auer — 23 March 2021

Policy discussions about the use of personal data often have “less is more” as a background assumption; that data is overconsumed relative to some hypothetical optimal baseline. This overriding skepticism has been the backdrop for sweeping new privacy regulations, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

More recently, as part of the broad pushback against data collection by online firms, some have begun to call for creating property rights in consumers’ personal data or for data to be treated as labor. Prominent backers of the idea include New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang and computer scientist Jaron Lanier.

The discussion has escaped the halls of academia and made its way into popular media. During a recent discussion with Tesla founder Elon Musk, comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan argued that Facebook is “one gigantic information-gathering business that’s decided to take all of the data that people didn’t know was valuable and sell it and make f***ing billions of dollars.” Musk appeared to agree.

The animosity exhibited toward data collection might come as a surprise to anyone who has taken Econ 101. Goods ideally end up with those who value them most. A firm finding profitable ways to repurpose unwanted scraps is just the efficient reallocation of resources. This applies as much to personal data as to literal trash.

Unfortunately, in the policy sphere, few are willing to recognize the inherent trade-off between the value of privacy, on the one hand, and the value of various goods and services that rely on consumer data, on the other. Ideally, policymakers would look to markets to find the right balance, which they often can. When the transfer of data is hardwired into an underlying transaction, parties have ample room to bargain.

But this is not always possible. In some cases, transaction costs will prevent parties from bargaining over the use of data. The question is whether such situations are so widespread as to justify the creation of data property rights, with all of the allocative inefficiencies they entail. Critics wrongly assume the solution is both to create data property rights and to allocate them to consumers. But there is no evidence to suggest that, at the margin, heightened user privacy necessarily outweighs the social benefits that new data-reliant goods and services would generate. Recent experience in the worlds of personalized medicine and the fight against COVID-19 help to illustrate this point.

Data Property Rights and Personalized Medicine

The world is on the cusp of a revolution in personalized medicine. Advances such as the improved identification of biomarkers, CRISPR genome editing, and machine learning, could usher a new wave of treatments to markedly improve health outcomes.

Personalized medicine uses information about a person’s own genes or proteins to prevent, diagnose, or treat disease. Genetic-testing companies like 23andMe or Family Tree DNA, with the large troves of genetic information they collect, could play a significant role in helping the scientific community to further medical progress in this area.

However, despite the obvious potential of personalized medicine, many of its real-world applications are still very much hypothetical. While governments could act in any number of ways to accelerate the movement’s progress, recent policy debates have instead focused more on whether to create a system of property rights covering personal genetic data.

Some raise concerns that it is pharmaceutical companies, not consumers, who will reap the monetary benefits of the personalized medicine revolution, and that advances are achieved at the expense of consumers’ and patients’ privacy. They contend that data property rights would ensure that patients earn their “fair” share of personalized medicine’s future profits.

But it’s worth examining the other side of the coin. There are few things people value more than their health. U.S. governmental agencies place the value of a single life at somewhere between $1 million and $10 million. The commonly used quality-adjusted life year metric offers valuations that range from $50,000 to upward of $300,000 per incremental year of life.

It therefore follows that the trivial sums users of genetic-testing kits might derive from a system of data property rights would likely be dwarfed by the value they would enjoy from improved medical treatments. A strong case can be made that policymakers should prioritize advancing the emergence of new treatments, rather than attempting to ensure that consumers share in the profits generated by those potential advances.

These debates drew increased attention last year, when 23andMe signed a strategic agreement with the pharmaceutical company Almirall to license the rights related to an antibody Almirall had developed. Critics pointed out that 23andMe’s customers, whose data had presumably been used to discover the potential treatment, received no monetary benefits from the deal. Journalist Laura Spinney wrote in The Guardian newspaper:

23andMe, for example, asks its customers to waive all claims to a share of the profits arising from such research. But given those profits could be substantial—as evidenced by the interest of big pharma—shouldn’t the company be paying us for our data, rather than charging us to be tested?

In the deal’s wake, some argued that personal health data should be covered by property rights. A cardiologist quoted in Fortune magazine opined: “I strongly believe that everyone should own their medical data—and they have a right to that.” But this strong belief, however widely shared, ignores important lessons that law and economics has to teach about property rights and the role of contractual freedom.

Why Do We Have Property Rights?

Among the many important features of property rights is that they create “excludability,” the ability of economic agents to prevent third parties from using a given item. In the words of law professor Richard Epstein:

[P]roperty is not an individual conception, but is at root a social conception. The social conception is fairly and accurately portrayed, not by what it is I can do with the thing in question, but by who it is that I am entitled to exclude by virtue of my right. Possession becomes exclusive possession against the rest of the world…

Excludability helps to facilitate the trade of goods, offers incentives to create those goods in the first place, and promotes specialization throughout the economy. In short, property rights create a system of exclusion that supports creating and maintaining valuable goods, services, and ideas.

But property rights are not without drawbacks. Physical or intellectual property can lead to a suboptimal allocation of resources, namely market power (though this effect is often outweighed by increased ex ante incentives to create and innovate). Similarly, property rights can give rise to thickets that significantly increase the cost of amassing complementary pieces of property. Often cited are the historic (but contested) examples of tolling on the Rhine River or the airplane patent thicket of the early 20^th century. Finally, strong property rights might also lead to holdout behavior, which can be addressed through top-down tools, like eminent domain, or private mechanisms, like contingent contracts.

In short, though property rights—whether they cover physical or information goods—can offer vast benefits, there are cases where they might be counterproductive. This is probably why, throughout history, property laws have evolved to achieve a reasonable balance between incentives to create goods and to ensure their efficient allocation and use.

Personal Health Data: What Are We Trying to Incentivize?

There are at least three critical questions we should ask about proposals to create property rights over personal health data.

What goods or behaviors would these rights incentivize or disincentivize that are currently over- or undersupplied by the market?
Are goods over- or undersupplied because of insufficient excludability?
Could these rights undermine the efficient use of personal health data?

Much of the current debate centers on data obtained from direct-to-consumer genetic-testing kits. In this context, almost by definition, firms only obtain consumers’ genetic data with their consent. In western democracies, the rights to bodily integrity and to privacy generally make it illegal to administer genetic tests against a consumer or patient’s will. This makes genetic information naturally excludable, so consumers already benefit from what is effectively a property right.

When consumers decide to use a genetic-testing kit, the terms set by the testing firm generally stipulate how their personal data will be used. 23andMe has a detailed policy to this effect, as does Family Tree DNA. In the case of 23andMe, consumers can decide whether their personal information can be used for the purpose of scientific research:

You have the choice to participate in 23andMe Research by providing your consent. … 23andMe Research may study a specific group or population, identify potential areas or targets for therapeutics development, conduct or support the development of drugs, diagnostics or devices to diagnose, predict or treat medical or other health conditions, work with public, private and/or nonprofit entities on genetic research initiatives, or otherwise create, commercialize, and apply this new knowledge to improve health care.

Because this transfer of personal information is hardwired into the provision of genetic-testing services, there is space for contractual bargaining over the allocation of this information. The right to use personal health data will go toward the party that values it most, especially if information asymmetries are weeded out by existing regulations or business practices.

Regardless of data property rights, consumers have a choice: they can purchase genetic-testing services and agree to the provider’s data policy, or they can forgo the services. The service provider cannot obtain the data without entering into an agreement with the consumer. While competition between providers will affect parties’ bargaining positions, and thus the price and terms on which these services are provided, data property rights likely will not.

So, why do consumers transfer control over their genetic data? The main reason is that genetic information is inaccessible and worthless without the addition of genetic-testing services. Consumers must pass through the bottleneck of genetic testing for their genetic data to be revealed and transformed into usable information. It therefore makes sense to transfer the information to the service provider, who is in a much stronger position to draw insights from it. From the consumer’s perspective, the data is not even truly “transferred,” as the consumer had no access to it before the genetic-testing service revealed it. The value of this genetic information is then netted out in the price consumers pay for testing kits.

If personal health data were undersupplied by consumers and patients, testing firms could sweeten the deal and offer them more in return for their data. U.S. copyright law covers original compilations of data, while EU law gives 15 years of exclusive protection to the creators of original databases. Legal protections for trade secrets could also play some role. Thus, firms have some incentives to amass valuable health datasets.

But some critics argue that health data is, in fact, oversupplied. Generally, such arguments assert that agents do not account for the negative privacy externalities suffered by third-parties, such as adverse-selection problems in insurance markets. For example, Jay Pil Choi, Doh Shin Jeon, and Byung Cheol Kim argue:

Genetic tests are another example of privacy concerns due to informational externalities. Researchers have found that some subjects’ genetic information can be used to make predictions of others’ genetic disposition among the same racial or ethnic category. … Because of practical concerns about privacy and/or invidious discrimination based on genetic information, the U.S. federal government has prohibited insurance companies and employers from any misuse of information from genetic tests under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA).

But if these externalities exist (most of the examples cited by scholars are hypothetical), they are likely dwarfed by the tremendous benefits that could flow from the use of personal health data. Put differently, the assertion that “excessive” data collection may create privacy harms should be weighed against the possibility that the same collection may also lead to socially valuable goods and services that produce positive externalities.

In any case, data property rights would do little to limit these potential negative externalities. Consumers and patients are already free to agree to terms that allow or prevent their data from being resold to insurers. It is not clear how data property rights would alter the picture.

Proponents of data property rights often claim they should be associated with some form of collective bargaining. The idea is that consumers might otherwise fail to receive their “fair share” of genetic-testing firms’ revenue. But what critics portray as asymmetric bargaining power might simply be the market signaling that genetic-testing services are in high demand, with room for competitors to enter the market. Shifting rents from genetic-testing services to consumers would undermine this valuable price signal and, ultimately, diminish the quality of the services.

Perhaps more importantly, to the extent that they limit the supply of genetic information—for example, because firms are forced to pay higher prices for data and thus acquire less of it—data property rights might hinder the emergence of new treatments. If genetic data is a key input to develop personalized medicines, adopting policies that, in effect, ration the supply of that data is likely misguided.

Even if policymakers do not directly put their thumb on the scale, data property rights could still harm pharmaceutical innovation. If existing privacy regulations are any guide—notably, the previously mentioned GDPR and CCPA, as well as the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—such rights might increase red tape for pharmaceutical innovators. Privacy regulations routinely limit firms’ ability to put collected data to new and previously unforeseen uses. They also limit parties’ contractual freedom when it comes to gathering consumers’ consent.

At the margin, data property rights would make it more costly for firms to amass socially valuable datasets. This would effectively move the personalized medicine space further away from a world of permissionless innovation, thus slowing down medical progress.

In short, there is little reason to believe health-care data is misallocated. Proposals to reallocate rights to such data based on idiosyncratic distributional preferences threaten to stifle innovation in the name of privacy harms that remain mostly hypothetical.

Data Property Rights and COVID-19

The trade-off between users’ privacy and the efficient use of data also has important implications for the fight against COVID-19. Since the beginning of the pandemic, several promising initiatives have been thwarted by privacy regulations and concerns about the use of personal data. This has potentially prevented policymakers, firms, and consumers from putting information to its optimal social use. High-profile issues have included:

Privacy fears derailing contact-tracing applications;
Privacy activists militating against the creation of vaccine passports and/or green passes; and
Objections to the use of search data to detect and predict COVID-19 clusters.

Each of these cases may involve genuine privacy risks. But to the extent that they do, those risks must be balanced against the potential benefits to society. If privacy concerns prevent us from deploying contact tracing or green passes at scale, we should question whether the privacy benefits are worth the cost. The same is true for rules that prohibit amassing more data than is strictly necessary, as is required by data-minimization obligations included in regulations such as the GDPR.

If our initial question was instead whether the benefits of a given data-collection scheme outweighed its potential costs to privacy, incentives could be set such that competition between firms would reduce the amount of data collected—at least, where minimized data collection is, indeed, valuable to users. Yet these considerations are almost completely absent in the COVID-19-related privacy debates, as they are in the broader privacy debate. Against this backdrop, the case for personal data property rights is dubious.

Conclusion

The key question is whether policymakers should make it easier or harder for firms and public bodies to amass large sets of personal data. This requires asking whether personal data is currently under- or over-provided, and whether the additional excludability that would be created by data property rights would offset their detrimental effect on innovation.

Swaths of personal data currently lie untapped. With the proper incentive mechanisms in place, this idle data could be mobilized to develop personalized medicines and to fight the COVID-19 outbreak, among many other valuable uses. By making such data more onerous to acquire, property rights in personal data might stifle the assembly of novel datasets that could be used to build innovative products and services.

On the other hand, when dealing with diffuse and complementary data sources, transaction costs become a real issue and the initial allocation of rights can matter a great deal. In such cases, unlike the genetic-testing kits example, it is not certain that users will be able to bargain with firms, especially where their personal information is exchanged by third parties.

If optimal reallocation is unlikely, should property rights go to the person covered by the data or to the collectors (potentially subject to user opt-outs)? Proponents of data property rights assume the first option is superior. But if the goal is to produce groundbreaking new goods and services, granting rights to data collectors might be a superior solution. Ultimately, this is an empirical question.

As Richard Epstein puts it, the goal is to “minimize the sum of errors that arise from expropriation and undercompensation, where the two are inversely related.” Rather than approach the problem with the preconceived notion that initial rights should go to users, policymakers should ensure that data flows to those economic agents who can best extract information and knowledge from it.

As things stand, there is little to suggest that the trade-offs favor creating data property rights. This is not an argument for requisitioning personal information or preventing parties from transferring data as they see fit, but simply for letting markets function, unfettered by misguided public policies.

The Deterioration of Appropriate Remedies in Patent Disputes

Dirk Auer — 11 August 2020

This blog post summarizes the findings of a paper published in Volume 21 of the Federalist Society Review. The paper was co-authored by Dirk Auer, Geoffrey A. Manne, Julian Morris, & Kristian Stout. It uses the analytical framework of law and economics to discuss recent patent law reforms in the US, and their negative ramifications for inventors. The full paper can be found on the Federalist Society’s website, here.

Property rights are a pillar of the free market. As Harold Demsetz famously argued, they spur specialization, investment and competition throughout the economy. And the same holds true for intellectual property rights (IPRs).

However, despite the many social benefits that have been attributed to intellectual property protection, the past decades have witnessed the birth and growth of an powerful intellectual movement seeking to reduce the legal protections offered to inventors by patent law.

These critics argue that excessive patent protection is holding back western economies. For instance, they posit that the owners of the standard essential patents (“SEPs”) are charging their commercial partners too much for the rights to use their patents (this is referred to as patent holdup and royalty stacking). Furthermore, they argue that so-called patent trolls (“patent-assertion entities” or “PAEs”) are deterring innovation by small startups by employing “extortionate” litigation tactics.

Unfortunately, this movement has led to a deterioration of appropriate remedies in patent disputes.

The many benefits of patent protection

While patents likely play an important role in providing inventors with incentives to innovate, their role in enabling the commercialization of ideas is probably even more important.

By creating a system of clearly defined property rights, patents empower market players to coordinate their efforts in order to collectively produce innovations. In other words, patents greatly reduce the cost of concluding mutually-advantageous deals, whereby firms specialize in various aspects of the innovation process. Critically, these deals occur in the shadow of patent litigation and injunctive relief. The threat of these ensures that all parties have an incentive to take a seat at the negotiating table.

This is arguably nowhere more apparent than in the standardization space. Many of the most high-profile modern technologies are the fruit of large-scale collaboration coordinated through standards developing organizations (SDOs). These include technologies such as Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, 5G, Blu-Ray, USB-C, and Thunderbolt 3. The coordination necessary to produce technologies of this sort is hard to imagine without some form of enforceable property right in the resulting inventions.

The shift away from injunctive relief

Of the many recent reforms to patent law, the most significant has arguably been a significant limitation of patent holders’ availability to obtain permanent injunctions. This is particularly true in the case of so-called standard essential patents (SEPs).

However, intellectual property laws are meaningless without the ability to enforce them and remedy breaches. And injunctions are almost certainly the most powerful, and important, of these remedies.

The significance of injunctions is perhaps best understood by highlighting the weakness of damages awards when applied to intangible assets. Indeed, it is often difficult to establish the appropriate size of an award of damages when intangible property—such as invention and innovation in the case of patents—is the core property being protected. This is because these assets are almost always highly idiosyncratic. By blocking all infringing uses of an invention, injunctions thus prevent courts from having to act as price regulators. In doing so, they also ensure that innovators are adequately rewarded for their technological contributions.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, LLC significantly narrowed the circumstances under which patent holders could obtain permanent injunctions. This predictably led lower courts to grant fewer permanent injunctions in patent litigation suits.

But while critics of injunctions had hoped that reducing their availability would spur innovation, empirical evidence suggests that this has not been the case so far.

Other reforms

And injunctions are not the only area of patent law that have witnessed a gradual shift against the interests of patent holders. Much of the same could be said about damages awards, revised fee shifting standards, and the introduction of Inter Partes Review.

Critically, the intellectual movement to soften patent protection has also had ramifications outside of the judicial sphere. It is notably behind several legislative reforms, particularly the America Invents Act. Moreover, it has led numerous private parties – most notably Standard Developing Organizations (SDOs) – to adopt stances that have advanced the interests of technology implementers at the expense of inventors.

For instance, one of the most noteworthy reforms has been IEEE’s sweeping reforms to its IP policy, in 2015. The new rules notably prevented SEP holders from seeking permanent injunctions against so-called “willing licensees”. They also mandated that royalties pertaining to SEPs should be based upon the value of the smallest saleable component that practices the patented technology. Both of these measures ultimately sought to tilt the bargaining range in license negotiations in favor of implementers.

Concluding remarks

The developments discussed in this article might seem like small details, but they are part of a wider trend whereby U.S. patent law is becoming increasingly inhospitable for inventors. This is particularly true when it comes to the enforcement of SEPs by means of injunction.

While the short-term effect of these various reforms has yet to be quantified, there is a real risk that, by decreasing the value of patents and increasing transaction costs, these changes may ultimately limit the diffusion of innovations and harm incentives to invent.

This likely explains why some legislators have recently put forward bills that seek to reinforce the U.S. patent system (here and here).

Despite these initiatives, the fact remains that there is today a strong undercurrent pushing for weaker or less certain patent protection. If left unchecked, this threatens to undermine the utility of patents in facilitating the efficient allocation of resources for innovation and its commercialization. Policymakers should thus pay careful attention to the changes this trend may bring about and move swiftly to recalibrate the patent system where needed in order to better protect the property rights of inventors and yield more innovation overall.

Why the FTC had to Abandon the Duty to Deal Argument Against Qualcomm

Geoffrey Manne & Ben Sperry — 16 January 2020

On November 22, the FTC filed its answering brief in the FTC v. Qualcomm litigation. As we’ve noted before, it has always seemed a little odd that the current FTC is so vigorously pursuing this case, given some of the precedents it might set and the Commission majority’s apparent views on such issues. But this may also help explain why the FTC has now opted to eschew the district court’s decision and pursue a novel, but ultimately baseless, legal theory in its brief.

The FTC’s decision to abandon the district court’s reasoning constitutes an important admission: contrary to the district court’s finding, there is no legal basis to find an antitrust duty to deal in this case. As Qualcomm stated in its reply brief (p. 12), “the FTC disclaims huge portions of the decision.” In its effort to try to salvage its case, however, the FTC reveals just how bad its arguments have been from the start, and why the case should be tossed out on its ear.

What the FTC now argues

The FTC’s new theory is that SEP holders that fail to honor their FRAND licensing commitments should be held liable under “traditional Section 2 standards,” even though they do not have an antitrust duty to deal with rivals who are members of the same standard-setting organizations (SSOs) under the “heightened” standard laid out by the Supreme Court in Aspen and Trinko:

To be clear, the FTC does not contend that any breach of a FRAND commitment is a Sherman Act violation. But Section 2 liability is appropriate when, as here, a monopolist SEP holder commits to license its rivals on FRAND terms, and then implements a blanket policy of refusing to license those rivals on any terms, with the effect of substantially contributing to the acquisition or maintenance of monopoly power in the relevant market….
The FTC does not argue that Qualcomm had a duty to deal with its rivals under the Aspen/Trinko standard. But that heightened standard does not apply here, because—unlike the defendants in Aspen, Trinko, and the other duty-to-deal precedents on which it relies—Qualcomm entered into a voluntary contractual commitment to deal with its rivals as part of the SSO process, which is itself a derogation from normal market competition. And although the district court applied a different approach, this Court “may affirm on any ground finding support in the record.” Cigna Prop. & Cas. Ins. Co. v. Polaris Pictures Corp., 159 F.3d 412, 418-19 (9th Cir. 1998) (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added) (pp.69-70).

In other words, according to the FTC, because Qualcomm engaged in the SSO process—which is itself “a derogation from normal market competition”—its evasion of the constraints of that process (i.e., the obligation to deal with all comers on FRAND terms) is “anticompetitive under traditional Section 2 standards.”

The most significant problem with this new standard is not that it deviates from the basis upon which the district court found Qualcomm liable; it’s that it is entirely made up and has no basis in law.

Absent an antitrust duty to deal, patent law grants patentees the right to exclude rivals from using patented technology

Part of the bundle of rights connected with the property right in patents is the right to exclude, and along with it, the right of a patent holder to decide whether, and on what terms, to sell licenses to rivals. The law curbs that right only in select circumstances. Under antitrust law, such a duty to deal, in the words of the Supreme Court in Trinko, “is at or near the outer boundary of §2 liability.” The district court’s ruling, however, is based on the presumption of harm arising from a SEP holder’s refusal to license, rather than an actual finding of anticompetitive effect under §2. The duty to deal it finds imposes upon patent holders an antitrust obligation to license their patents to competitors. (While, of course, participation in an SSO may contractually obligate an SEP-holder to license its patents to competitors, that is an entirely different issue than whether it operates under a mandatory requirement to do so as a matter of public policy).

The right of patentees to exclude is well-established, and injunctions enforcing that right are regularly issued by courts. Although the rate of permanent injunctions has decreased since the Supreme Court’s eBay decision, research has found that federal district courts still grant them over 70% of the time after a patent holder prevails on the merits. And for patent litigation involving competitors, the same research finds that injunctions are granted 85% of the time. In principle, even SEP holders can receive injunctions when infringers do not act in good faith in FRAND negotiations. See Microsoft Corp. v. Motorola, Inc., 795 F.3d 1024, 1049 n.19 (9th Cir. 2015):

We agree with the Federal Circuit that a RAND commitment does not always preclude an injunctive action to enforce the SEP. For example, if an infringer refused to accept an offer on RAND terms, seeking injunctive relief could be consistent with the RAND agreement, even where the commitment limits recourse to litigation. See Apple Inc., 757 F.3d at 1331–32.

Aside from the FTC, federal agencies largely agree with this approach to the protection of intellectual property. For instance, the Department of Justice, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology recently released their 2019 Joint Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments, which clarifies that:

All remedies available under national law, including injunctive relief and adequate damages, should be available for infringement of standards-essential patents subject to a F/RAND commitment, if the facts of a given case warrant them. Consistent with the prevailing law and depending on the facts and forum, the remedies that may apply in a given patent case include injunctive relief, reasonable royalties, lost profits, enhanced damages for willful infringement, and exclusion orders issued by the U.S. International Trade Commission. These remedies are equally available in patent litigation involving standards-essential patents. While the existence of F/RAND or similar commitments, and conduct of the parties, are relevant and may inform the determination of appropriate remedies, the general framework for deciding these issues remains the same as in other patent cases. (emphasis added).

By broadening the antitrust duty to deal well beyond the bounds set by the Supreme Court, the district court opinion (and the FTC’s preferred approach, as well) eviscerates the right to exclude inherent in patent rights. In the words of retired Federal Circuit Judge Paul Michel in an amicus brief in the case:

finding antitrust liability premised on the exercise of valid patent rights will fundamentally abrogate the patent system and its critical means for promoting and protecting important innovation.

And as we’ve noted elsewhere, this approach would seriously threaten consumer welfare:

Of course Qualcomm conditions the purchase of its chips on the licensing of its intellectual property; how could it be any other way? The alternative would require Qualcomm to actually facilitate the violation of its property rights by forcing it to sell its chips to device makers even if they refuse its patent license terms. In that world, what device maker would ever agree to pay more than a pittance for a patent license? The likely outcome is that Qualcomm charges more for its chips to compensate (or simply stops making them). Great, the FTC says; then competitors can fill the gap and — voila: the market is more competitive, prices will actually fall, and consumers will reap the benefits.
Except it doesn’t work that way. As many economists, including both the current [now former] and a prominent former chief economist of the FTC, have demonstrated, forcing royalty rates lower in such situations is at least as likely to harm competition as to benefit it. There is no sound theoretical or empirical basis for concluding that using antitrust to move royalty rates closer to some theoretical ideal will actually increase consumer welfare. All it does for certain is undermine patent holders’ property rights, virtually ensuring there will be less innovation.

The FTC realizes the district court doesn’t have the evidence to support its duty to deal analysis

Antitrust law does not abrogate the right of a patent holder to exclude and to choose when and how to deal with rivals, unless there is a proper finding of a duty to deal. In order to find a duty to deal, there must be a harm to competition, not just a competitor, which, under the Supreme Court’s Aspen and Trinko cases can be inferred in the duty-to-deal context only where the challenged conduct leads to a “profit sacrifice.” But the record does not support such a finding. As we wrote in our amicus brief:

[T]he Supreme Court has identified only a single scenario from which it may plausibly be inferred that defendant’s refusal to deal with rivals harms consumers: The existence of a prior, profitable course of dealing, and the termination and replacement of that arrangement with an alternative that not only harms rivals, but also is less profitable for defendant.
A monopolist’s willingness to forego (short-term) profits plausibly permits an inference that conduct is not procompetitive, because harm to a rival caused by an increase in efficiency should lead to higher—not lower—profits for defendant. And “[i]f a firm has been ‘attempting to exclude rivals on some basis other than efficiency,’ it’s fair to characterize its behavior as predatory.” Aspen Skiing, 472 U.S. at 605 (quoting Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox 138 (1978)).
In an effort to satisfy this standard, the district court states that “because Qualcomm previously licensed its rivals, but voluntarily stopped licensing rivals even though doing so was profitable, Qualcomm terminated a voluntary and profitable course of dealing.” Slip op. at 137.
But it is not enough merely that the prior arrangement was profitable. Rather, Trinko and Aspen Skiing hold that when a monopolist ends a profitable relationship with a rival, anticompetitive exclusion may be inferred only when it also refuses to engage in an ongoing arrangement that, in the short run, is more profitable than no relationship at all. The key is the relative value to the monopolist of the current options on offer, not the value to the monopolist of the terminated arrangement. See Trinko, 540 U.S. at 409 (“a willingness to forsake short-term profits”); Aspen Skiing, 472 U.S. at 610–11 (“it was willing to sacrifice short-run benefits”)…
The record here uniformly indicates Qualcomm expected to maximize its royalties by dealing with OEMs rather than rival chip makers; it neither anticipated nor endured short-term loss. As the district court itself concluded, Qualcomm’s licensing practices avoided patent exhaustion and earned it “humongously more lucrative” royalties. Slip op. at 1243–254. That Qualcomm anticipated greater profits from its conduct precludes an inference of anticompetitive harm.

Moreover, Qualcomm didn’t refuse to allow rivals to use its patents; it simply didn’t sell them explicit licenses to do so. As discussed in several places by the district court:

According to Andrew Hong (Legal Counsel at Samsung Intellectual Property Center), during license negotiations, Qualcomm made it clear to Samsung that “Qualcomm’s standard business practice was not to provide licenses to chip manufacturers.” Hong Depo. 161:16-19. Instead, Qualcomm had an “unwritten policy of not going after chip manufacturers.” Id. at 161:24-25… (p.123)
* * *
Alex Rogers (QTL President) testified at trial that as part of the 2018 Settlement Agreement between Samsung and Qualcomm, Qualcomm did not license Samsung, but instead promised only that Qualcomm would offer Samsung a FRAND license before suing Samsung: “Qualcomm gave Samsung an assurance that should Qualcomm ever seek to assert its cellular SEPs against that component business, against those components, we would first make Samsung an offer on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.” Tr. at 1989:5-10. (p.124)

This is an important distinction. Qualcomm allows rivals to use its patented technology by not asserting its patent rights against them—which is to say: instead of licensing its technology for a fee, Qualcomm allows rivals to use its technology to develop their own chips royalty-free (and recoups its investment by licensing the technology to OEMs that choose to implement the technology in their devices).

The irony of this analysis, of course, is that the district court effectively suggests that Qualcomm must charge rivals a positive, explicit price in exchange for a license in order to facilitate competition, while allowing rivals to use its patented technology for free (or at the “cost” of some small reduction in legal certainty, perhaps) is anticompetitive.

Nonetheless, the district court’s factual finding that Qualcomm’s licensing scheme was “humongously” profitable shows there was no profit sacrifice as required for a duty to deal finding. The general presumption that patent holders can exclude rivals is not subject to an antitrust duty to deal where there is no profit sacrifice by the patent holder. Here, however, Qualcomm did not sacrifice profits by adopting the challenged licensing scheme.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the FTC chose not to support the district court’s duty-to-deal argument, even though its holding was in the FTC’s favor. But, while the FTC was correct not to countenance the district court’s flawed arguments, the FTC’s alternative argument in its reply brief is even worse.

The FTC’s novel theory of harm is unsupported and weak

As noted, the FTC’s alternative theory is that Qualcomm violated Section 2 simply by failing to live up to its contractual SSO obligations. For the FTC, because Qualcomm joined an SSO, it is no longer in a position to refuse to deal legally. Moreover, there is no need to engage in an Aspen/Trinko analysis in order to find liability. Instead, according to the FTC’s brief, liability arises because the evasion of an exogenous pricing constraint (such as an SSO’s FRAND obligation) constitutes an antitrust harm:

Of course, a breach of contract, “standing alone,” does not “give rise to antitrust liability.” City of Vernon v. S. Cal. Edison Co., 955 F.2d 1361, 1368 (9th Cir. 1992); cf. Br. 52 n.6. Instead, a monopolist’s conduct that breaches such a contractual commitment is anticompetitive only when it satisfies traditional Section 2 standards—that is, only when it “tends to impair the opportunities of rivals and either does not further competition on the merits or does so in an unnecessarily restrictive way.” Cascade Health, 515 F.3d at 894. The district court’s factual findings demonstrate that Qualcomm’s breach of its SSO commitments satisfies both elements of that traditional test. (emphasis added)

To begin, it must be noted that the operative language quoted by the FTC from Cascade Health is attributed in Cascade Health to Aspen Skiing. In other words, even Cascade Health recognizes that Aspen Skiing represents the Supreme Court’s interpretation of that language in the duty-to-deal context. And in that case—in contrast to the FTC’s argument in its brief—the Court required demonstration of such a standard to mean that a defendant “was not motivated by efficiency concerns and that it was willing to sacrifice short-run benefits and consumer goodwill in exchange for a perceived long-run impact on its… rival.” (Aspen Skiing at 610-11) (emphasis added).

The language quoted by the FTC cannot simultaneously justify an appeal to an entirely different legal standard separate from that laid out in Aspen Skiing. As such, rather than dispensing with the duty to deal requirements laid out in that case, Cascade Health actually reinforces them.

Second, to support its argument the FTC points to Broadcom v. Qualcomm, 501 F.3d 297 (3rd Cir. 2007) as an example of a court upholding an antitrust claim based on a defendant’s violation of FRAND terms.

In Broadcom, relying on the FTC’s enforcement action against Rambus before it was overturned by the D.C. Circuit, the Third Circuit found that there was an actionable issue when Qualcomm deceived other members of an SSO by promising to

include its proprietary technology in the… standard by falsely agreeing to abide by the [FRAND policies], but then breached those agreements by licensing its technology on non-FRAND terms. The intentional acquisition of monopoly power through deception… violates antitrust law. (emphasis added)

Even assuming Broadcom were good law post-Rambus, the case is inapposite. In Broadcom the court found that Qualcomm could be held to violate antitrust law by deceiving the SSO (by falsely promising to abide by FRAND terms) in order to induce it to accept Qualcomm’s patent in the standard. The court’s concern was that, by falsely inducing the SSO to adopt its technology, Qualcomm deceptively acquired monopoly power and limited access to competing technology:

When a patented technology is incorporated in a standard, adoption of the standard eliminates alternatives to the patented technology…. Firms may become locked in to a standard requiring the use of a competitor’s patented technology.

Key to the court’s finding was that the alleged deception induced the SSO to adopt the technology in its standard:

We hold that (1) in a consensus-oriented private standard-setting environment, (2) a patent holder’s intentionally false promise to license essential proprietary technology on FRAND terms, (3) coupled with an SDO’s reliance on that promise when including the technology in a standard, and (4) the patent holder’s subsequent breach of that promise, is actionable conduct. (emphasis added)

Here, the claim is different. There is no allegation that Qualcomm engaged in deceptive conduct that affected the incorporation of its technology into the relevant standard. Indeed, there is no allegation that Qualcomm’s alleged monopoly power arises from its challenged practices; only that it abused its lawful monopoly power to extract supracompetitive prices. Even if an SEP holder may be found liable for falsely promising not to evade a commitment to deal with rivals in order to acquire monopoly power from its inclusion in a technological standard under Broadcom, that does not mean that it can be held liable for evading a commitment to deal with rivals unrelated to its inclusion in a standard, nor that such a refusal to deal should be evaluated under any standard other than that laid out in Aspen Skiing.

Moreover, the FTC nowhere mentions the DC Circuit’s subsequent Rambus decision overturning the FTC and calling the holding in Broadcom into question, nor does it discuss the Supreme Court’s NYNEX decision in any depth. Yet these cases stand clearly for the opposite proposition: a court cannot infer competitive harm from a company’s evasion of a FRAND pricing constraint. As we wrote in our amicus brief:

In Rambus Inc. v. FTC, 522 F.3d 456 (D.C. Cir. 2008), the D.C. Circuit, citing NYNEX, rejected the FTC’s contention that it may infer anticompetitive effect from defendant’s evasion of a constraint on its monopoly power in an analogous SEP-licensing case: “But again, as in NYNEX, an otherwise lawful monopolist’s end-run around price constraints, even when deceptive or fraudulent, does not alone present a harm to competition.” Id. at 466 (citation omitted). NYNEX and Rambus reinforce the Court’s repeated holding that an inference is permissible only where it points clearly to anticompetitive effect—and, bad as they may be, evading obligations under other laws or violating norms of “business morality” do not permit a court to undermine “[t]he freedom to switch suppliers [which] lies close to the heart of the competitive process that the antitrust laws seek to encourage. . . . Thus, this Court has refused to apply per se reasoning in cases involving that kind of activity.” NYNEX, 525 U.S. at 137 (citations omitted).

Essentially, the FTC’s brief alleges that Qualcomm’s conduct amounts to an evasion of the constraint imposed by FRAND terms—without which the SSO process itself is presumptively anticompetitive. Indeed, according to the FTC, it is only the FRAND obligation that saves the SSO agreement from being inherently anticompetitive.

In fact, when a firm has made FRAND commitments to an SSO, requiring the firm to comply with its commitments mitigates the risk that the collaborative standard-setting process will harm competition. Product standards—implicit “agreement[s] not to manufacture, distribute, or purchase certain types of products”—“have a serious potential for anticompetitive harm.” Allied Tube, 486 U.S. at 500 (citation and footnote omitted). Accordingly, private SSOs “have traditionally been objects of antitrust scrutiny,” and the antitrust laws tolerate private standard-setting “only on the understanding that it will be conducted in a nonpartisan manner offering procompetitive benefits,” and in the presence of “meaningful safeguards” that prevent the standard-setting process from falling prey to “members with economic interests in stifling product competition.” Id. at 500- 01, 506-07; see Broadcom, 501 F.3d at 310, 314-15 (collecting cases).
FRAND commitments are among the “meaningful safeguards” that SSOs have adopted to mitigate this serious risk to competition….
Courts have therefore recognized that conduct that breaches or otherwise “side-steps” these safeguards is appropriately subject to conventional Sherman Act scrutiny, not the heightened Aspen/Trinko standard… (p.83-84)

In defense of the proposition that courts apply “traditional antitrust standards to breaches of voluntary commitments made to mitigate antitrust concerns,” the FTC’s brief cites not only Broadcom, but also two other cases:

While this Court has long afforded firms latitude to “deal or refuse to deal with whomever [they] please[] without fear of violating the antitrust laws,” FountWip, Inc. v. Reddi-Wip, Inc., 568 F.2d 1296, 1300 (9th Cir. 1978) (citing Colgate, 250 U.S. at 307), it, too, has applied traditional antitrust standards to breaches of voluntary commitments made to mitigate antitrust concerns. In Mount Hood Stages, Inc. v. Greyhound Corp., 555 F.2d 687 (9th Cir. 1977), this Court upheld a judgment holding that Greyhound violated Section 2 by refusing to interchange bus traffic with a competing bus line after voluntarily committing to do so in order to secure antitrust approval from the Interstate Commerce Commission for proposed acquisitions. Id. at 69723; see also, e.g., Biovail Corp. Int’l v. Hoechst Aktiengesellschaft, 49 F. Supp. 2d 750, 759 (D.N.J. 1999) (breach of commitment to deal in violation of FTC merger consent decree exclusionary under Section 2). (p.85-86)

The cases the FTC cites to justify the proposition all deal with companies sidestepping obligations in order to falsely acquire monopoly power. The two cases cited above both involve companies making promises to government agencies to win merger approval and then failing to follow through. And, as noted, Broadcom deals with the acquisition of monopoly power by making false promises to an SSO to induce the choice of proprietary technology in a standard. While such conduct in the acquisition of monopoly power may be actionable under Broadcom (though this is highly dubious post-Rambus), none of these cases supports the FTC’s claim that an SEP holder violates antitrust law any time it evades an SSO obligation to license its technology to rivals.

Conclusion

Put simply, the district court’s opinion in FTC v. Qualcomm runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s Aspen decision and founders there. This is why the FTC is trying to avoid analyzing the case under Aspen and subsequent duty-to-deal jurisprudence (including Trinko, the 9th Circuit’s MetroNet decision, and the 10th Circuit’s Novell decision): because it knows that if the appellate court applies those standards, the district court’s duty-to-deal analysis will fail. The FTC’s basis for applying a different standard is unsupportable, however. And even if its logic for applying a different standard were valid, the FTC’s proffered alternative theory is groundless in light of Rambus and NYNEX. The Ninth Circuit should vacate the district court’s finding of liability.

Should Patent Hold-Out Concerns Trump Patent Hold-Up Misgivings?

Llobet & Padilla — 18 July 2019

[TOTM: The following is the seventh in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the FTC v. Qualcomm case recently decided by Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California. Other posts in this series are here.]

This post is authored by Gerard Lloblet, Professor of Economics at CEMFI, and Jorge Padilla, Senior Managing Director at Compass Lexecon. Both have advised SEP holders, and to a lesser extent licensees, in royalty negotiations and antitrust disputes.]

Over the last few years competition authorities in the US and elsewhere have repeatedly warned about the risk of patent hold-up in the licensing of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). Concerns about such risks were front and center in the recent FTC case against Qualcomm, where the Court ultimately concluded that Qualcomm had used a series of anticompetitive practices to extract unreasonable royalties from implementers. This post evaluates the evidence for such a risk, as well as the countervailing risk of patent hold-out.

In general, hold up may arise when firms negotiate trading terms after they have made costly, relation-specific investments. Since the costs of these investments are sunk when trading terms are negotiated, they are not factored into the agreed terms. As a result, depending on the relative bargaining power of the firms, the investments made by the weaker party may be undercompensated (Williamson, 1979).

In the context of SEPs, patent hold-up would arise if SEP owners were able to take advantage of the essentiality of their patents to charge excessive royalties to manufacturers of products reading on those patents that made irreversible investments in the standard (see Lemley and Shapiro (2007)). Similarly, in the recent FTC v. Qualcomm ruling, trial judge Lucy Koh concluded that firms may also use commercial strategies (in this case, Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy, refusing to deal with certain parties and demanding exclusivity from others) to extract royalties that depart from the FRAND benchmark.

After years of heated debate, however, there is no consensus about whether patent hold-up actually exists. Some argue that there is no evidence of hold-up in practice. If patent hold-up were a significant problem, manufacturers would anticipate that their investments would be expropriated and would thus decide not to invest in the first place. But end-product manufacturers have invested considerable amounts in standardized technologies (Galetovic et al, 2015). Others claim that while investment is indeed observed, actual investment levels are “necessarily” below those that would be observed in the absence of hold-up. They allege that, since that counterfactual scenario is not observable, it is not surprising that more than fifteen years after the patent hold-up hypothesis was first proposed, empirical evidence of its existence is lacking.

Meanwhile, innovators are concerned about a risk in the opposite direction, the risk of patent hold-out. As Epstein and Noroozi (2018) explain,

By “patent holdout” we mean the converse problem, i.e., that an implementer refuses to negotiate in good faith with an innovator for a license to valid patent(s) that the implementer infringes, and instead forces the innovator to either undertake significant litigation costs and time delays to extract a licensing payment through court order, or else to simply drop the matter because the licensing game is no longer worth the candle.

Patent hold-out, also known as “efficient infringement,” is especially relevant in the standardization context for two reasons. First, SEP owners are oftentimes required to license their patents under Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) conditions. Particularly when, as occurs in some jurisdictions, innovators are not allowed to request an injunction, they have little or no leverage in trying to require licensees to accept a licensing deal. Secondly, SEP owners typically possess many complementary patents and, therefore, seek to license their portfolio of SEPs at once, since that minimizes transaction costs. Yet, some manufacturers de facto refuse to negotiate in this way and choose to challenge the validity of the SEP portfolio patent-by-patent and/or jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction. This strategy involves large litigation costs and is therefore inefficient. SEP holders claim that this practice is anticompetitive and it also leads to royalties that are too low.

While the concerns of SEP holders seem to have attracted the attention of the leadership of the US DOJ (see, for example, here), some authors have dismissed them as theoretically groundless, empirically immaterial and irrelevant from an antitrust perspective (see here).

Evidence of patent hold-out from litigation

In an ongoing work, Llobet and Padilla (forthcoming), we analyze the effects of the sequential litigation strategy adopted by some manufacturers and compare its consequences with the simultaneous litigation of the whole portfolio. We show that sequential litigation results in lower royalty payments than simultaneous litigation and may result in under-compensation of innovation and the dissipation of social surplus when litigation costs are high.

The model relies on two basic and realistic assumptions. First, in sequential lawsuits, the result of a trial affects the probability that each party wins the following one. That is, if the manufacturer wins the first trial, it has a higher probability of winning the second, as a first victory may uncover information about the validity of other patents that relate to the same type of innovation, which will be less likely to be upheld in court. Second, the impact of a validity challenge on royalty payments is asymmetric: they are reduced to zero if the patent is found to be invalid but are not increased if it is found valid (and infringed).

Our results indicate that these features of the legal system can be strategically used by the manufacturer. The intuition is as follows. Suppose that the innovator sets a royalty rate for each patent for which, in the simultaneous trial case, the manufacturer would be indifferent between settling and litigating. Under sequential litigation, however, the manufacturer might be willing to challenge a patent because of the gain in a future trial. This is due to the asymmetric effects that winning or losing the second trial has on the royalty rate that this firm will have to pay. In particular, if the manufacturer wins the first trial, so that the first patent is invalidated, its probability of winning the second one increases, which means that the innovator is likely to settle for a lower royalty rate for the second patent or see both patents invalidated in court. In the opposite case, if the innovator wins the first trial, so that the second is also likely to be unfavorable to the manufacturer, the latter always has the option to pay up the original royalty rate and avoid the second trial. In other words, the possibility for the manufacturer to negotiate the royalty rate downwards after a victory, without the risk of it being increased in case of a defeat, fosters sequential litigation and results in lower royalties than the simultaneous litigation of all patents would produce.

This mechanism, while being applicable to any portfolio that includes patents the validity of which is related, becomes more significant in the context of SEPs for two reasons. The first is the difficulty of innovators to adjust their royalties upwards after the first successful trial, as it might be considered a breach of their FRAND commitments. The second is that, following recent competition law litigation in the EU and other jurisdictions, SEP owners are restricted in their ability to seek (preliminary) injunctions even in the case of willful infringement. Our analysis demonstrates that the threat of injunction mitigates, though it is unlikely to eliminate completely, the incentive to litigate sequentially and, therefore, excessively (i.e. even when such litigation reduces social welfare).

We also find a second motivation for excessive litigation: business stealing. Manufacturers litigate excessively in order to avoid payment and thus achieve a valuable cost advantage over their competitors. They prefer to litigate even when litigation costs are so large that it would be preferable for society to avoid litigation because their royalty burden is reduced both in absolute terms and relative to the royalty burden for its rivals (while it does not go up if the patents are found valid). This business stealing incentive will result in the under-compensation of innovators, as above, but importantly it may also result in the anticompetitive foreclosure of more efficient competitors.

Consider, for example, a scenario in which a large firm with the ability to fund protracted litigation efforts competes in a downstream market with a competitive fringe, comprising small firms for which litigation is not an option. In this scenario, the large manufacturer may choose to litigate to force the innovator to settle on a low royalty. The large manufacturer exploits the asymmetry with its defenseless small rivals to reduce its IP costs. In some jurisdictions it may also exploit yet another asymmetry in the legal system to achieve an even larger cost advantage. If both the large manufacturer and the innovator choose to litigate and the former wins, the patent is invalidated, and the large manufacturer avoids paying royalties altogether. Whether this confers a comparative advantage on the large manufacturer depends on whether the invalidation results in the immediate termination of all other existing licenses or not.

Our work thus shows that patent hold-out concerns are both theoretically cogent and have non-trivial antitrust implications. Whether such concerns merit intervention is an empirical matter. While reviewing that evidence is outside the scope of our work, our own litigation experience suggests that patent hold-out should be taken seriously.

In Apple, European Union, FTC v. Qualcomm: Analyzing the theory of the case, Intellectual Property, International, Justice Department, Patent, Platforms, Truth on the Market ftc, FTC v Qualcomm, patent holdout, patent holdup, Qualcomm

UK COURT OF APPEAL UPHOLDS FRAND INJUNCTION

Natasha Nayak — 30 October 2018

Last week, the UK Court of Appeal upheld the findings of the High Court in an important case regarding standard essential patents (SEPs). Of particular significance, the Court of Appeal upheld the finding that the defendant, an implementer of SEPs, could have the sale of its products enjoined in the UK unless it enters into a global licensing deal on terms deemed by the court to be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND). The case is noteworthy not least because the threat of an injunction of this sort has become increasingly rare in other jurisdictions, arguably resulting in an imbalance in bargaining power between patent holders and implementers.

The case concerned patents held by Unwired Planet (most of which had been purchased from Ericsson) that it had declared to be essential to the operation of various telecommunications standards. Chinese telecom giant Huawei had incorporated these patented technologies in its products but disputed the legitimacy of Unwired Planet’s (UP) patents and refused to license them on the terms that were offered.

By way of a background to the case, in March 2014, UP resorted to suing Huawei, Samsung and Google and claiming an injunction when it found it hard to secure licenses. After the commencement of proceedings, UP made licence offers to the defendants. It made offers in April and July 2014 respectively and during the proceedings, including a worldwide SEP portfolio licence, a UK SEP portfolio licence and per-patent licences for any of the SEPs in suit. The defendants argued that the offers were not FRAND. Huawei and Samsung also contended that the offers were in breach of European competition law. UP settled with Google. Three technical trials of the patents began and UP was able to show that at least two of the patents sued upon were valid and essential and had been infringed. Subsequently, Samsung secured a settlement (at a rate below the market rate) and the FRAND trial went ahead with just Huawei.

Judge Birss delivered the High Court order on April 5, 2017. He held that UP’s patents were valid and infringed and it did not abuse its dominant position by requesting an injunction. He ordered a FRAND injunction that was stayed pending appeal against the two patents that had been infringed. The injunction was subject to a number of conditions which are applied because the case was dealing with patents subject to a FRAND undertaking. It will cease to have effect if Huawei enters into the FRAND license determined by the Court. He also observed that the parties can return for further determination when such license expires. Furthermore, it was held that there was one set of FRAND terms and that the scope of this FRAND was world wide.

The UK Court of Appeal (the bench consisting of Lord Justice Kitchin, Lord Justice Floyd, Lady Justice Asplin) in handing down a 291 paragraph, 66 page judgment dealing with Huawei’s appeal, upheld Birss’ findings. The centrality of Huawei’s appeal focused on the global nature of the FRAND license and the non-discrimination undertaking of UP’s FRAND commitments. Some significant findings of the Court of Appeal are briefly provided below.

The Court of Appeal in upholding Birss’ decision noted that it was unfair to say that UP is using the threat of an injunction to leverage Huawei into taking a global license, and that Huawei had the option to take the global license or submit to an injunction in the UK. Drawing attention to the potential complexities in a FRAND negotiation, the Court observed:

..The owner of a SEP may still use the threat of an injunction to try to secure the payment of excessive licence fees and so engage in hold-up activities. Conversely, the infringer may refuse to engage constructively or behave unreasonably in the negotiation process and so avoid paying the licence fees to which the SEP owner is properly entitled, a process known as “hold-out”.

Furthermore, Huawei argues that imposition of a global license on terms set by a national court based on a national finding of infringement is wrong in principle. It also states that there is currently an ongoing patent litigation in both Germany and China and that there are some countries where UP holds “no relevant” patents at all.

In response to these contentions, the Court of Appeal has held that it may be highly impractical for a SEP owner to seek to negotiate a license of its patent rights in each country and rejected the submission made by Huawei that the approach adopted by Birss in these proceedings is out of line with the territorial nature of patent litigations. It clarified that Birss did not adjudicate on issues of infringement or validity concerning foreign SEPs and did not usurp the rights of foreign courts. It further observed that such an approach of Birss is consistent with the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee dated 29 November 2017 (COM (2017) 712 final) (“the November 2017 EU Communication”) which notes in section 2.4:

For products with a global circulation, SEP licences granted on a worldwide basis may contribute to a more efficient approach and therefore can be compatible with FRAND.

The Court of Appeal however disagreed with Birss on the issue that there was only one set of FRAND terms. This view of the bench certainly comes as a relief since it seems to appropriately reflect the practical realities of a FRAND negotiation. The Court held:

Patent licences are complex and, having regard to the commercial priorities of the participating undertakings and the experience and preferences of the individuals involved, may be structured in different ways in terms of, for example, the particular contracting parties, the rights to be included in the licence, the geographical scope of the licence, the products to be licensed, royalty rates and how they are to be assessed, and payment terms. Further, concepts such as fairness and reasonableness do not sit easily with such a rigid approach.

Similarly, on the non- discrimination prong of FRAND, the Court of Appeal agreed with Birss that it was not “hard-edged” and the test is whether such difference in rates distorts competition between the licensees. It also noted that the “hard-edged” interpretation would be “akin to the re-insertion of a “most favoured licensee” clause in the FRAND undertaking” which does not seem to be what the standards body, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) had in mind when it formulated its policies. The Court also held :

We consider that a non-discrimination rule has the potential to harm the technological development of standards if it has the effect of compelling the SEP owner to accept a level of compensation for the use of its invention which does not reflect the value of the licensed technology.

Finally, the Court of Appeal held that UP did not abuse its dominant position just because it failed to strictly comply with the safe harbor framework laid down by Court of Justice of the European Union in Huawei v. ZTE. The only requirement that must be satisfied before proceedings are commenced by the SEP holder is that the SEP holder give sufficient notice to or consult with the implementer.

The Court of Appeal’s decision offers some significant guidance to the emerging policy debate on FRAND. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the decision is significant particularly for the reason that UP is one of a total of two cases in the last two years, where an injunctive relief has been granted in instances involving standard essential patents. Such reliefs have been rarely granted in years in the first place. The second such instance of a grant of injunction pertains to Huawei v. Samsung where the Shenzhen Court in China held earlier this year that Huawei met the FRAND obligation while Samsung did not (negotiations were dragged on for 6 years). An injunction was granted against Samsung for infringing two of Huawei’s Chinese patents which are counterparts of two U.S. asserted patents (however Judge Orrick of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California enjoined Huawei from enforcing the injunction).

Current jurisprudence on injunctive relief with respect to FRAND encumbered SEPs is that there is no per se ban on these reliefs. However, courts have been very reluctant to actually grant them. While injunctions are statutory remedies, and granted automatically in most cases when a patent is found to be infringed, administrative agencies and courts have held a position that shows that FRAND commitments certainly limit this premise.

Following the eBay decision in the U.S., defendants in infringement claims involving SEPs have argued that permanent injunctions should not be available for FRAND-encumbered SEPs and were upheld in cases such as Apple v. Motorola in 2014 (where Judge Randall Radar also makes a sound case for evidence of a hold out by Apple in his dissenting order). However, in an institutional bargaining framework of FRAND, which is based on a mutuality of considerations, such a recourse is misplaced and likely to inevitably disturb this balance. The current narrative on FRAND that dominates policymaking and jurisprudence is incomplete in its unilateral focus of avoiding the possible problem of a patent hold up in the absence of concrete evidence indicating its probability. In Ericsson v D-Links Judge Davis of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit underscored this point when he observed that “if an accused infringer wants an instruction on patent hold-up and royalty stacking [to be given to the jury], it must provide evidence on the record of patent hold-up and royalty stacking.”

Remedies emanating from a one sided perspective tilt the bargaining dynamic in favour of implementers and if the worst penalty a SEP infringer has to pay is the FRAND royalty it would have otherwise paid beforehand, then a hold out or a reverse hold up by implementers becomes a very profitable strategy. Remedies for patent infringement cannot be ignored because they are also core to the framework for licensing negotiations and ensuring compliance by licensees. A disproportionate reliance on liability rules over property rights is likely to exacerbate the countervailing problem of hold out and detrimentally impact incentives to innovate, ultimately undermining the welfare goals that such enforcement seeks to achieve.

The Court of Appeal has therefore given valuable guidance in its decision when it noted:

Just as implementers need protection, so too do the SEP owners. They are entitled to an appropriate reward for carrying out their research and development activities and for engaging with the standardization process, and they must be able to prevent technology users from free-riding on their innovations. It is therefore important that implementers engage constructively in any FRAND negotiation and, where necessary, agree to submit to the outcome of an appropriate FRAND determination.

Hopefully this order brings with it some balance in FRAND negotiations as well as a shift in the perspective of courts in how they adjudicate on these litigations. It underscores an oft forgotten principle that is core to the FRAND framework- that FRAND is a two-way street, as was observed in the celebrated case of Huawei v. ZTE in 2015.

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Truth on the Market

Archives For patent holdout

Unpacking the Flawed 2021 Draft USPTO, NIST, & DOJ Policy Statement on Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs)

Collaborative Standard-Setting and Specialization as Substitutes for Proprietary Standards and Vertical Integration

The Importance of Intellectual Property Rights for Startup Activity

The Role of Strong SEP Rights in Guarding Against China’s ‘Cyber Great Power’ Ambitions

Conclusion

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Data Property Rights and COVID-19

Conclusion

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The Deterioration of Appropriate Remedies in Patent Disputes

The many benefits of patent protection

The shift away from injunctive relief

Other reforms

Concluding remarks

Share this:

Like this:

Why the FTC had to Abandon the Duty to Deal Argument Against Qualcomm

What the FTC now argues

Absent an antitrust duty to deal, patent law grants patentees the right to exclude rivals from using patented technology

The FTC realizes the district court doesn’t have the evidence to support its duty to deal analysis

The FTC’s novel theory of harm is unsupported and weak

Conclusion

Share this:

Like this:

Should Patent Hold-Out Concerns Trump Patent Hold-Up Misgivings?

Evidence of patent hold-out from litigation

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Like this:

UK COURT OF APPEAL UPHOLDS FRAND INJUNCTION

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