Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments August 5, 2002 erstellt
Description:
The paper builds a tractable model of a patent pool, an agreement among patent owners to license a set of their patents to one another or to third parties. It first provides a necessary and sufficient condition for a patent pool to enhance welfare. It shows that requiring pool members to be able to independently license patents matters if and only if the pool is otherwise welfare reducing, a property that allows the antitrust authorities to use this requirement to screen out unattractive pools.The paper then undertakes a number of extensions. It evaluates the quot;external test,quot; according to which patents with substitutes should not be included in a pool; analyzes the welfare implications of the reductionin the members' incentives to invent around or challenge the validity of each other's patents; looks at the rationale for the (common) provision of automatic assignment of future related patents to the pool; and, last, studies the intellectual property owners' incentives to form a pool or to cross-license when they themselves are users of the patents in the pool