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Patent Licensing and Secondary Markets in the Nineteenth Century

The following post comes from CPIP Programs and Research Associate Terrica Carrington, a rising 3L at George Mason University School of Law, and Devlin Hartline, Assistant Director at CPIP. They review a paper from CPIP’s 2014 Fall Conference, Common Ground: How Intellectual Property Unites Creators and Innovators, that was recently published in the George Mason Law Review.

By Terrica Carrington & Devlin Hartline

In his paper, Patent Licensing and Secondary Markets in the Nineteenth Century, CPIP Senior Scholar Adam Mossoff gives important historical context to the ongoing debate over patent licensing firms. He explains that some of the biggest misconceptions about such firms are that the patent licensing business model and the secondary market for patents are relatively new phenomena. On the contrary, Mossoff shows that “famous nineteenth-century American inventors,” such as Charles Goodyear, Elias Howe, and Thomas Edison, “wholeheartedly embraced patent licensing to commercialize their inventions.” Moreover, he demonstrates that there was “a vibrant secondary market” where patents were bought and sold with regularity.

Like many inventors, Mossoff explains, it was curiosity—rather than market success—that drove Charles Goodyear to create. Despite having invented the process for vulcanized rubber, Goodyear “never manufactured or sold rubber products.” While he enjoyed finding new uses for the material, commercialization was not his niche. Instead, Goodyear “transferred his rights in his patented innovation to other individuals and firms” so that they could capitalize on his inventions. “As the archetypal obsessive inventor,” notes Mossoff, “Goodyear was not interested in manufacturing or selling his patented innovations.” In fact, his assignees and licensees “filed hundreds of lawsuits in the nineteenth century,” demonstrating that “patent licensing companies are nothing new in America’s innovation economy.”

Mossoff next looks at Elias Howe, best known for his invention of the sewing machine lockstitch in 1843, who “licensed his patented innovation for most of his life.” Howe was also famous for “suing commercial firms and individuals for patent infringement” and then entering into royalty agreements with them. It was Howe’s troubles with “noncompliant infringers” that “precipitated the first ‘patent war’ in the American patent system—called, at the time, the Sewing Machine War.” Howe engaged in “practices that are alleged to be relatively novel today,” such as “third-party litigation financing,” and he even joined “the first patent pool formed in American history,” known as “the Sewing Machine Combination of 1856.”

Finally, Mossoff discusses Thomas Edison, whom many consider to be “an early exemplar of the patent licensing business model.” Edison sold and licensed his patents, especially early on, so that he could fund his research and development. However, Edison is a “mixed historical example” since “he manufactured and sold some of his patented innovation to consumers, such as the electric light bulb and the phonograph.” Moreover, despite his “path-breaking inventions,” the marketplace was often dominated by his competitors. Mossoff notes that Edison was a better inventor than businessman: “At the end of the day, Edison should have stuck to the patent licensing business model that brought him his justly earned fame as a young innovator at Menlo Park.”

While some might call these inventors anomalies, Mossoff reveals that they were in good company with others who utilized the patent licensing business model to serve “one of the key policy functions of the patent system by commercializing patented innovation in the United States.” These include “William Woodworth (planing machine), Thomas Blanchard (lathe), and Obed Hussey and Cyrus McCormick (mechanical reaper)” and many others who “sold or licensed their patent rights in addition to engaging in manufacturing and other commercial activities.” This licensing business model continues to be used today by innovative firms such as Bell Labs, IBM, Apple, and Nokia.

Mossoff next rebuts the “oft-repeated claim” made by many law professors that “large-scale selling and licensing of patents in a secondary market is a recent phenomenon.” This claim is as “profoundly mistaken as the related assertion that the patent licensing business model is novel.” Mossoff notes that during the Sewing Machine War of the Antebellum Era, “the various patents obtained by different inventors on different components of the sewing machine were purchased or exchanged between a variety of individuals and firms.” As early as the 1840s, individuals acquired patents in the secondary market and used them to sue infringers.

In fact, Mossoff points out that it was not uncommon to see newspaper ads offering patents for sale in the nineteenth century:

The classified ads in Scientific American provide a window into this vibrant and widespread secondary market. In an 1869 issue of Scientific American, among ads touting the value to purchasers of “Woodbury’s Patent Planing and Matching and Moulding Machines” and ads declaring “AGENTS WANTED—To sell H.V. Van Etten’s Patent Device for Catching and Holding Domestic Animals,” one finds ads offering patents and rights in patents for sale:

Such ads were ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, says Mossoff, and they “belie any assertions about the absence of such historical secondary markets by commentators today.” Similarly, Mossoff points to research showing the “fundamental and significant role” performed by intermediaries known as “patent agents,” the “predecessors of today’s patent aggregators.” These patent agents invested in a wide range of products and industries—a remarkable feat given the “constraints of primitive, nineteenth-century corporate law and the limited financial capabilities of market actors at that time.”

In his brief yet insightful account of the history of patent licensing firms, Mossoff refutes the modern misconception that “the patent licensing business model and secondary markets in patents are novel practices today.” It’s important to set the record straight, especially as many in modern patent policy debates rely on erroneous historical accounts to make negative inferences. The evidence from the nineteenth century isn’t that surprising since it reflects “the basic economic principle of the division of labor that Adam Smith famously recognized as essential to a successful free market and flourishing economy.” Casting “aspersions on this basic economic principle,” Mossoff concludes, “strikes at the very core of what it means to secure property rights in innovation through the patent system.”

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How Rhetorical Epithets Have Led the FTC Astray in its Study of Patent Licensing Firms

We’ve all heard the narrative about patent licensing firms, often referred to pejoratively as “patent trolls.” These patent owners, who choose to license their innovations rather than build them, are the supposed poster-children of a “broken” patent system. It’s as if commercializing one’s property, just like a landlord leases his land for another to use, is suddenly a bad thing. Nevertheless, the power of this “troll” rhetoric cannot be denied. Many provisions in 2011’s Leahy-Smith America Invents Act were aimed at starving out these “trolls,” and no less than five bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate seek to further deflate their sails.

Another example of the powerful appeal of the “patent troll” rhetoric is that the agencies charged with enforcing antitrust law have also been convinced that there is something amiss with the commercial licensing of patented innovation in the marketplace. This has been a key feature of the deployment of patented inventions in America’s innovation economy since the early nineteenth century, as scholars have shown. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) instigated its own investigative study of what it calls “patent assertion entities” (PAEs), which is merely a more formal and neutral-sounding synonym for the popularized “patent troll” epithet.

In a new paper published in the George Mason Law Review, Sticks and Stones: How the FTC’s Name-Calling Misses the Complexity of Licensing-Based Business Models, CPIP Senior Scholar Kristen Osenga takes a closer look at the FTC’s ongoing study of PAEs and finds that it is destined to fail for two simple, yet inescapably obvious, reasons.

The first is the basic definitional problem of the FTC’s characterization of PAEs, which puts all patent licensing firms in the same boat. Failing to take a more nuanced approach, Osenga warns, “fires up the rhetoric but obscures thoughtful discussion and debate about the issue.” Building upon her previous work, she explains:

[T]he real problem is that patent licensing firms are treated as a homogenous category, with no attention paid to the wide range of business models that exist under the patent licensing firm umbrella. The categorical determination of patent licensing firms as “problems” imputes to a large, diverse group of firms the negative actions and qualities of a small number of bad actors.

Since not all “trolls” are alike, Osenga cautions, it’s “naïve and inaccurate” to lump them all together. And when the FTC makes this mistake, it leads to a situation “where words actually can hurt, much more so than sticks and stones.” The FTC’s study is explicitly “premised on a one-size-fits-all conception of patent licensing firms.” Rather than shedding much-needed light on the complex innovation ecosystem, the study promises to squander the opportunity by failing to recognize that not all “trolls” are the same.

Osenga notes that the FTC is uniquely situated to obtain nonpublic information about how these patent licensing firms operate using its investigative power under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act. Unfortunately, however, the study is premised on the faulty notion that the only upside of patenting licensing firms is to “compensate inventors.” But this focus on patents-as-incentives misses the forest for the trees, Osenga urges, as it fails to account for the larger patent-commercialization network:

[T]here are many steps between invention and the introduction of an actual product to the market and consumers. These steps include transforming an idea in to a marketable embodiment, developing facilities to produce the marketable embodiment, creating distribution channels to bring the embodiment to the consumer, and making the consumer aware of the new product. Each of these steps requires its own additional resources in the form of both capital and labor.

The FTC study, like many patent skeptics, fails to consider the benefits of the division of labor that patent licensing firms represent. Not every inventor is willing or able to bring an invention to the marketplace. Osenga’s point is that patent licensing does more than simply compensate inventors for their troubles; it creates liquid markets and solves problems of asymmetrical actors and information. These exchanges increase innovation and competition by playing the role of match-maker and market-maker, and they place valuable patents into the hands of those who are better positioned to exploit their worth.

Osenga points out that there are indeed possible negative effects with patent licensing firms. For example, they sometimes engage in ex post licensing, waiting to offer licenses until after the would-be licensee has already adopted the technology. These firms can be better positioned litigation-wise since their potential exposure is typically less than that of the infringers they sue. Finally, patent aggregators tend to have greater market power, and it can be difficult to judge the quality of any given patent that’s asserted when they offer to license their entire portfolio.

As with all things, Osenga stresses, there’s both good and bad. The problem is figuring out which is greater. The FTC could conduct a study that reveals a “detailed understanding of the complex world of patent licensing firms,” she laments, but that’s not what the FTC is doing:

[T]he configuration of the study is slanted in such a way that only part of the story will be uncovered. Worse still, the study has been shaped in a way that will simply add fuel to the anti-“patent troll” fire without providing any data that would explain the best way to fix the real problems in the patent field today.

This leads to the second problem with the FTC study, which follows as a necessary, logical consequence from the first definitional problem: There are serious methodological problems with the study that will undermine any possible empirical conclusions that the FTC may wish to draw.

Osenga says that the FTC’s study is simply not asking the right questions. Painting a complete picture of complex licensing schemes requires more than just counting the number of patents a firm has and adding up the attempts to negotiate license deals. To really get to the bottom of things, she contends, the FTC should be asking why patentees sell their patents to licensing firms and why licensing firms buy them from patentees. Better still, ask them why they decided to become patent licensing firms in the first place.

This insight is powerful stuff. It’s not enough to simply ask these firms what they’re doing; to really understand them, the FTC must ask them why they’re doing it. And the results are likely to be varied:

Some, of course, begin with this business model in mind. Others invent new technology but are unable to successfully commercialize it themselves, despite making efforts to do so. Still others exist as practicing entities for years or decades before something changes—supply change issues, rampant infringement by competitors, and regulatory initiatives—and they are no longer able to exist as a viable practicing entity.

Similarly, the FTC could ask them what kind of firms they are, and these answers are also likely to be diverse. Osenga’s point is that the FTC’s questions aren’t designed to showcase the vast differences between the various types of patent licensing firms. If the FTC wants to get to the bottom of how these firms affect innovation and competition, the first step should be to realize that they’re not all the same. The FTC’s study is as clumsy as those who refer to all such firms as “patent trolls,” and the lack of nuance going in will unfortunately produce a study that lacks nuance coming out.

In the end, Osenga agrees that deterring abusive behavior is a good thing, and she worries about innovation and competition. However, unlike many in patent policy debates, she is also concerned that the rhetoric is having an undue influence on policymakers. Throwing all patent licensing firms under the “patent troll” bus will not get us the narrowly-tailored reforms that we need. Sadly, the FTC’s approach with its ongoing study appears to have swallowed this rhetoric wholesale, and it seems unlikely that the results will be anything but more fuel for the “patent troll” pyre.