Tag: standard essential patents

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Patent Licensing

LeadershIP 2020: Injunctive Relief in Standard-Essential Patent Cases

The following post comes from Colin Kreutzer, a 2E at Scalia Law and a Research Assistant at CPIP.

a hand holding a phone with holograms hovering above the screenBy Colin Kreutzer

The LeadershIP conference is dedicated to promoting an open dialogue on global issues surrounding innovation, intellectual property, and antitrust policy. On September 10th, LeadershIP kicked off its 2020 series of virtual events with a panel discussion featuring three government agency leaders: PTO Director Andrei Iancu, NIST Director Walter Copan, and Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division.

Moderator David Kappos, a former PTO Director and current partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, led a discussion about the role of standard-essential patents (SEPs) in modern industry and the legal effect that an SEP designation has on patent owners. The main topic of discussion was the importance of retaining the right to injunctive relief against infringers. The panelists had released a joint statement on this subject last year, following some unwelcome court decisions and what they viewed as misinterpretations of an earlier statement from 2013. View the video of the panel discussion here.

SEPs and F/RAND

The adoption of industry-wide technical standards helps industries to thrive by promoting efficiency and interoperability among competitors. A group that authors such standards is known as a standards developing organization (SDO), and it can include representatives from governments, private companies, and universities all over the world. For example, mobile communications standards such as 4G broadband technology are developed by the ITU, a group within the United Nations.

Developing a complex technical framework necessarily involves the use of many patented technologies. When the use of a certain patented technology is essential for adhering to the industry standard, it is known as a standard-essential patent.

Since owning an SEP can give the patent owner leverage over an entire industry, SDOs often require an agreement from patent owners before electing to use their technology in the standard. To be included, owners must commit to licensing their invention to all interested parties on terms that are fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND). Some forms of this agreement omit the word “fair,” leaving only “RAND.” They can be collectively referred to as F/RAND commitments.

Holdup and Holdout

The combination of public standards and private property rights can create perverse incentives for both patent owners and technology implementers alike. Once a company is bound to an industry standard, a patent owner may refuse to honor its F/RAND commitment and demand licensing fees that are grossly disproportionate to the patent’s actual value. A practice like this is known as “holdup.” But the presence of F/RAND agreements can encourage the licensee to practice “holdout” as well. In that case, a company will simply use the technology without paying any fees, ostensibly because the owner would not agree to fair and reasonable terms. Holdup and holdout can both weaken standard-setting efforts by breeding distrust and discouraging participation.

The panelists talked about the chain of events that they feel resulted in too much emphasis on preventing holdup at the expense of giving holdout a green light.

The 2013 and 2019 Letters

In 2013, the PTO and DOJ released a joint policy statement on the issue of appropriate legal remedies for SEP owners. The statement said it may not always be proper seek an injunction in a district court or to ban importation of products using an exclusion order at the International Trade Commission. Citing “an effort to reduce . . . opportunistic conduct” and the need to “provide assurances to implementers of the standard that the patented technologies will be available,” the letter suggested that a voluntary F/RAND commitment may imply that “money damages, rather than injunctive or exclusionary relief, is the appropriate remedy for infringement in certain circumstances.” The letter indicated that, at least under certain circumstances, no remedies should be available that would halt the actual flow of products or impede the implementation of a technical standard. Instead, the SEP owners could expect only monetary judgments that would be decided after the fact.

In the years following this statement, several court decisions were handed down denying injunctive relief in SEP infringement cases. In Apple v. Motorola for example, the N.D. Illinois court reasoned that when an SEP owner commits to licensing its patent to everyone, the dispute narrows to one of price: “[b]y committing to license its patents on FRAND terms, Motorola committed to license the [patent] to anyone willing to pay a FRAND royalty and thus implicitly acknowledged that a royalty is adequate compensation.” On appeal, the Federal Circuit objected to this rationale as a per se rule, but it upheld the denial of injunctive relief all the same.

The agencies became concerned that an entirely different legal standard was being applied when the patent in question was encumbered by a F/RAND commitment. So in 2019 the USPTO and DOJ, now joined by the NIST, released a new statement. In this one, they sought to clarify that, while F/RAND commitments should be considered as a factor, they “need not act as a bar” to injunctive or exclusionary orders. The three agency heads were unified on the importance of keeping these remedies available.

Andrei Iancu, Director, USPTO

Director Iancu talked about the critical role that innovation plays in the United States economy and the need to be vigilant in our protection of IP. Inventors must be certain that their protections are reliable, whether regarding infringement, remedies, march-in rights, or any other current issue. He discussed the various measures the Office is taking to improve our IP system. This includes COVID-response actions, such as fee deferral for small entities and the switch to an all-electronic filing system.

For an IP system to be robust, it must be founded on sound policy considerations. In this vein, Director Iancu discussed various PTO policies. Recent changes at the PTAB are designed to ensure a balance between patent owners and petitioners. The Office has issued new guidance on § 101 issues to provide greater clarity on what constitutes patentable subject matter. The PTO’s chief economist reported that “uncertainty” has decreased by 44% following this new guidance. And, of course, the joint policy statement is a step toward restoring all available remedies.

On the main topic, Director Iancu kept it simple: SEPs are patents. He emphasized that injunctive relief truly goes to the heart of the property rights conferred by a patent, as the right to exclude is explicitly provided in our Constitution. He rejected the notion that a special set of rules should apply when a F/RAND commitment is involved, and he warned about what would happen if there were: “One of the fundamental principles here is that if you have categorical rules, whether in fact or as perceived, then you create a system that leads to perverse incentives and bad outcomes.” There will be far less incentive to negotiate a license agreement up front when infringers “know categorically that they will not be enjoined.”

Walter Copan, Director, NIST

Director Copan discussed the various roles that NIST play in our economy and in promoting innovation, including: advanced 5G communications, standards leadership and cooperation with the private sector, cybersecurity, biotech innovation and protection, and manufacturing and supply chain security.

His most important objective at NIST is strengthening America’s competitiveness in the world. A strong IP system is the “bedrock” of this position and SEPs figure in prominently. The U.S. share of worldwide IP is on the decline while that of China is growing. One avenue that China is using to assert itself on the world stage is through China Standards 2035, a 15-year plan to become the leader in standards development for next generation technology. Copan and others made a case for the desired SEP remedies as part of an effort to maintain or improve the United States’ global standing on issues of IP and standards development. He said that our international partners are starting to see “the value and power of injunctive relief” to discourage infringement at will.

He also emphasized the same core ideas as the other panelists: SEPs are patents, and they are entitled to the same remedies as any other patent. Rather than favoring one of holdup or holdout over the other, we should focus on encouraging good-faith negotiation.

As a patent owner himself, he has been through a number of injunctive processes and knows first-hand that this form of relief is a “key part in the suite of remedies” available. He expressed excitement about the new policy statement and the international momentum that accompanies it, but he cautioned that this effort “is a journey” and there is a long way to go.

Makan Delrahim, Assistant Attorney General, USDOJ Antitrust Division

Assistant Attorney General Delrahim described the issues in the context of his New Madison approach to IP and antitrust policy, and the four core principles that form the basis of the New Madison approach.

First, patent holdup is not an antitrust issue. The DOJ has long recognized that SDOs are procompetitive institutions, and that the interoperability they provide is a major benefit to consumers. However, that does not mean that SEP holdup is an inherently anticompetitive practice, or that antitrust law is the appropriate forum in which to settle such disputes. He described as “radical” the idea that a patent owner could be accused of an antitrust violation simply for reneging on F/RAND obligations, and that contract law would be far more appropriate.

Second, SDOs shouldn’t be used as “vehicles” by which either implementers or patent owners gain advantages over each other. Instead SDO policies should strive for a balance which maximizes the incentives for innovators to innovate and for implementers to implement. “Negotiating in the shadow of dubious antitrust liability is not only unnecessary, it dramatically shifts the bargaining power between patent holders and implementers in a way that distorts the incentives for real competition on the merits.”

Third, as discussed above, the fundamental right conferred by a patent is the right to exclude. Courts should be very hesitant to take that right away. Doing so can effectively create a compulsory licensing regime, which has been largely disfavored in the U.S. for decades.

Finally, at least from an antitrust perspective, the refusal to license a patent should not be considered per se legal. This will allow F/RAND negotiations to take place “in the shadows of contract law” without the threat of treble damages under the Sherman Act, and thus without “skewing the negotiations in favor of an implementer.”

Conclusion

In closing, the panelists were unified in their views as laid out in the joint policy statement. They were optimistic about the direction in which the law is headed, both in the U.S. as well as with international partners such as Germany and the U.K. And they looked forward to continuing the full restoration of a critical remedy for owners of standard-essential patents.

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Patent Law Uncategorized

New Paper Addresses Flaws in Patent Holdup Theory

dictionary entry for the word "innovate"Stephen Haber and Alexander Galetovic of the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Prosperity (IP2) published a new working paper on the problems with Patent Holdup Theory. In “The Fallacies of Patent Holdup Theory,” Professors Haber and Galetovic show that Patent Holdup Theory is based on three fundamental errors. Professor Haber presented this work in October at CPIP’s 2016 Fall Conference.

At its core, Patent Holdup Theory asserts that patents impede innovation through holdup and royalty stacking, and that these problems are exacerbated in fields reliant on standard essential patents. First, the paper shows that Patent Holdup Theory contradicts basic understandings of holdup in Transaction Cost Economics. The second problem identified in the paper is that “royalty stacking” cannot occur in the way the Theory requires because holdup cannot occur multiple times to the same firm. Third and finally, Patent Holdup Theory implicitly requires the fallacious result that patents add little or no value to the markets they help create, particularly in the context of technology standardization.

Haber and Galetovic also make an interesting observation about the implications of Patent Holdup Theory that show why it should have been obvious that the Theory was flawed from the beginning. If the premises of Patent Holdup Theory were correct, innovation in industries where it occurred would be stagnant. The fact that innovation is strong in the high tech industries suggests that there is a problem with the Theory. This paper provides excellent insights into identifying the exact problems with the Theory.

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Economic Study Innovation Inventors Patent Law Patent Licensing Uncategorized

How Strong Patents Make Wealthy Nations

By Devlin Hartline & Kevin Madigan

dictionary entry for the word "innovate"How did the world’s wealthiest nations grow rich? The answer, according to Professor Stephen Haber of Stanford University, is that “they had well-developed systems of private property.” In Patents and the Wealth of Nations, recently published in the CPIP Conference issue of the George Mason Law Review, Haber explains the connection: Property rights beget trade, trade begets specialization, specialization begets productivity, and productivity begets wealth. Without a foundation of strong property rights, economic development suffers. But does the same hold true for intellectual property, particularly patents? Referencing economic history and econometric analysis, Haber shows that strong patents do indeed make wealthy nations.

Before diving into the history and analysis, Haber tackles the common misconception that patents are different than other types of property because they are monopolies: “It is not, as some IP critics maintain, a grant of monopoly. Rather, it is a temporary property right to something that did not exist before that can be sold, licensed, or traded.” The simple reason for this, Haber notes, is that a patent grants a monopoly only if there are truly no substitutes, but this is almost never the case. Usually, there are many substitutes and the patent owner has no market power. And the “fact that patents are property rights means that they can serve as the basis for the web of contracts that permits individuals and firms to specialize in what they do best.”

Turning back to his claim that strong patents make wealthy nations, Haber presents data showing the relationship between the strength of enforceable patent rights and the level of economic development across several different countries. The results are remarkably clear: “there are no wealthy countries with weak patent rights, and there are no poor countries with strong patent rights.” The following figure shows how GDP per capita increases as patent rights get stronger:

Haber - Figure 1: The Relationship Between Enforcable Patent Rights and GDP/c in 2010 (Excludes Oil-Based Economies, 2005 PPP$). X-axis: Strength of Enforceable Patent Rights in 2010 (from 0 to 45). Y-axis: GDP Per Capita in 2010, PPP$ from PWT 8.1 (from $0 to $60,000).

Of course, while it’s clear that patent strength and GDP per capita are related, it’s possible that the causality runs the other way. That is, how do we know that an increase in GDP per capita doesn’t foster an environment where patents tend to be stronger? This is where the evidence from economic historians and econometric analysts comes into play. Exploring what economic history has to tell us about the impact of patent laws on innovation, Haber asks whether the Industrial Revolution was bolstered by the British patent system and whether the United States emerged as a high-income industrial economy because of the U.S. patent system.

To the first question, Haber notes that the consensus among historians is that “from at least the latter half of the eighteenth century, the patent system promoted the inventive activity associated with the Industrial Revolution.” He then cites the recent book by Sean Bottomley that carefully shows how “many of the changes to Britain’s patent laws and their enforcement—the requirement for detailed specifications, patents conceived as property rights, the emergence of patent agents—all preceded, rather than followed, the onset of industrialization.” Haber also cites a research paper by Petra Moser, which finds that countries in the nineteenth century with weak patent systems trailed both Britain and the United States in technological development.

Moving to the United States, Haber notes that three generations of economic historians have agreed that just after it gained independence, the country’s strong patent system played a pivotal role in fomenting the remarkable industrial developments that soon followed. After pointing out that the United States was the first country to call for a patent system in its Constitution, Haber compares the GDP per capita for the United States, Britain, and Brazil from 1700 to 1913. The following figure shows just how quickly the agrarian American colonies caught up with, and ultimately surpassed, Britain in GDP per capita, while the GDP per capita of Brazil, a country that became independent at about the same time but had no patent system, stagnated:

Haber - Figure 2: GDP per capita, 1700-1913 (in Real 1990 Dollars). UK, USA, and Brazil. X-axis: 1700, 1820, 1930, 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890,1900, 1913. Y-axis: $0 to $5,500 by $500 increments.

As the figure shows, the GDP per capita in the United States and Brazil were less than half that of Britain in 1700, and by 1913, the United States had overtaken Britain as both countries left Brazil far behind. Noting that “there is uniformity of views among economic historians that the U.S. patent system played a large role” in this success, Haber provides specifics examples of improvements upon the British patent system that contributed to it, including broad access to property rights in technology through low fees and a routine and impersonal application process under the Patent Act of 1790. He goes on to highlight the importance of major reforms to the U.S. patent system introduced in the Patent Act of 1836, including the examination process that “reduced concerns third parties might have had about a patent’s novelty, thereby facilitating the evolution of a market for patented technologies.”

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the development of an active market for inventions in the United States, leading to the emergence of a class of specialized and independent inventors as well as patent brokers, patent agents, and patent attorneys, who would connect the inventors with manufacturers looking to buy or license new technologies. While some of these intermediaries were derided, much like the “patent trolls” of the twenty-first century, as “patent sharks,” Haber contends that this market for inventions played a critical role in the emergence of new industrial technologies and centers: “[O]ne would be hard pressed to make the case that patents in the nineteenth century, or the intermediaries who represented their inventors, did anything but facilitate the rapid development of American manufacturing.”

Haber then shifts his focus to econometric analysis, examining the different ways that economic scholars research the relationship between patent rights and economic progress in different countries over a period of time. He stresses that accurate econometric estimation of causal relationships is a relatively young area of inquiry requiring considerable care. He uses the example of a widely-cited study by Josh Lerner, which looks at “whether the strengthening of patents affects the rate of change of innovation in an economy within a two-year window after a patent reform.” Haber points out that many changes neither begin nor end so quickly. With laser technology, for example, “follow-on innovations” have developed “over decades, not two-year windows,” and Lerner’s study thus discounts much innovation.

Looking at studies that utilize a “very long time dimension,” Haber cites one finding that “there is a significant positive effect of patent laws on innovation rates” and another finding that “patent intensive industries in countries that improve the strength of patents experience faster growth in value added than less patent-intensive industries in those same countries.” Haber praises a recent study by Jihong Zhang, Ding Du, and Walter G. Park, who “not only find that there is a positive relationship between the strength of enforceable patent rights and innovation in developed economies, but that that relationship holds for underdeveloped economies as well.”

In sum, Haber states that “there is a critical mass of multi-country studies” that leads to two conclusions:

First, there is a causal relationship between the strength of patent rights and innovation. Second, this relationship is non-linear: there are threshold effects such that stronger patent rights positively impact innovation once a society has already reached some critical level of economic development. The reason for the non-linearity probably resides in the fact that innovation is not just a product of the strength of patent rights, but of other features of societies, which are necessary complements, that tend to be absent at low levels of economic development.

Finally, Haber looks at whether the innovation landscape of the twenty-first century is somehow so different that the lessons from economic history and econometric analysis no longer apply. In particular, he questions whether the emergence of patent licensing firms, sometimes called “patent assertion entities” or “PAEs,” and the alleged strategic behavior of “patent holdup” with standard-essential patents (SEPs) are really new features of the U.S. patent system that might hinder innovation. Haber concludes that the evidence shows that neither PAEs nor patent holdup is hindering innovation. In fact, there’s little reason to think that patent holdup even exists.

Haber takes on the recent study by James Bessen and Michael Meurer, which claims that PAEs are a new phenomenon that “constitute a direct tax on innovation” to the tune of “$29 billion per year.” This claim has been rebutted, Haber notes, by scholars such as B. Zorina Khan, whose recent study shows that many great inventors of the nineteenth century were themselves PAEs. Haber further cites the recent paper by David L. Schwartz and Jay P. Kesan that carefully demonstrates fundamental problems with Bessen and Meurer’s methodology, including selection bias, the conflation of “costs” with “transfers,” the lack of a benchmark for comparison, and the failure to even consider the benefits of PAE activity.

Turning to patent holdup, Haber points out that products have long been comprised of numerous patented innovations, and he cites a recent paper by Adam Mossoff showing that there’s nothing “new about firms whose sole source of revenue comes from the licensing of essential patents.” As to evidence that innovation is hindered by patent holdup, Haber notes that the “theoretical literature” says it’s possible, but the “evidence in support of this theory, however, is largely anecdotal.” Haber then cites his recent study with Alexander Galetovic and Ross Levine, which looks at the “extensive economics literature on the measurement of productivity growth” and shows that “SEP holders” are not able “to negotiate excessive royalty payments” as predicted by the patent holdup theory.

In conclusion, Haber acknowledges that while “no single piece of evidence” should “be viewed as dispositive,” it’s certainly quite “telling that the weight of evidence from two very different bodies of scholarship, employing very different approaches to evidence—one based on mastering the facts of history, the other based on statistical modeling—yield the same answer: there is a causal relationship between strong patents and innovation.” Haber then challenges the naysayers to make their case: “Evidence and reason therefore suggest that the burden of proof falls on those who claim that patents frustrate innovation.” Given the copious evidence showing that strong patents make wealthy nations, the IP critics have their work cut out for them.

For a PDF version of this post, please click here.

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Antitrust Injunctions ITC Patent Law Patent Licensing Patent Theory Remedies Uncategorized

Guest Post by Richard Epstein: The Dangerous Adventurism of the United States Trade Representative – Lifting the Ban against Apple Products Unnecessarily Opens a Can of Worms in Patent Law

The Dangerous Adventurism of the United States Trade Representative:
Lifting the Ban against Apple Products Unnecessarily Opens a Can of Worms in Patent Law

 Richard A. Epstein

In ordinary times, the business of the International Trade Commission does not appear as the lead story in the Wall Street Journal, predicting massive changes in the high-stakes patent battles. But these are not ordinary times, given the ongoing multi-front war between Apple and Samsung, in which each side has accused the other of serious acts of patent infringement. So when the International Trade Commission issued its order excluding Apple’s still popular iPhone 4 and older versions of the iPad, the smart money predicted that the Obama Administration, acting through the United States Trade Representative, would for the first time in 25 years decide to overrule a decision of the ITC, which it pointedly did in a three page letter of August 3, 2012, signed by Ambassador Michael B. G. Froman and addressed to Irving A. Williamson, Chairman of the ITC, whose wings have definitely been clipped.

Injunctions, Damages, or Something in Between

Properly understood, that letter should be regarded as a patent bombshell whose significance goes far beyond the individual case. The choice of remedy in patent disputes has been, at least since the much-cited 2006 Supreme Court decision in eBay v. MercExchange, one of the central issues in patent law. In the academic literature there has been an extensive debate as to whether various forms of injunctive relief should be allowed as a matter of course, or whether the court should place great weight on so-called public interest factors that many modern patent lawyers claim should displace a remedy which under prior legal practice had been awarded largely “as a matter of course.”

That last phrase is not intended to indicate that blanket injunctions should be awarded in any and all cases. Instead, by analogy to traditional equitable principles as applied in various other contexts, including ordinary nuisance cases, the basic principle is subject to some important qualifications that do not undermine the force of the basic rule. First, any patentee may forfeit in whole or in part the right to an injunction by improper conduct on his own part: taking undue delay with respect to enforcement could lead to a loss in some cases of injunctive relief. But the application of this doctrine is within the control of the patentee, who can preserve his rights by promptly asserting them, which means that this issue almost never comes into play with valuable patents that are consistently asserted. Second, traditional doctrine allows a court to delay the enforcement of an injunction to allow the infringer to fix his device, and perhaps even deny the injunction in those cases where a complex device contains many patented components, of which only one is in violation.

The Magic of Section 337 in FRAND Cases

The decision of the Trade Representative did not point to any such complications in the case justifying a departure from the usual remedy of an injunction. Indeed the ITC order was not lightly entered into, for it was agreed by all commissioners that Apple had indeed infringed the Samsung patents in ways that would have resulted in extensive damage awards if the case had been tried in a federal court. The ITC does not have statutory powers to award damages, so the Commission thought, perhaps mistakenly, that it was bound to make an all-or-nothing choice: allow or exclude the importation of the infringing device. Under the applicable statutory provisions of Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, the ITC is supposed to take into account a number of “public interest factors” that address “the effect of such [exclusion or order] upon the public health and welfare, competitive conditions in the United States economy, the production of like or directly competitive articles in the United States, and United States consumers . . .”

The language in this section is quite broad on its face, and if it were applied in a literal fashion, the history of proceedings before the ITC should be replete with decisions that let infringing products into the United   States. The words “public health and welfare” are in modern American English broad enough to allow foreign pharmaceuticals into the United States even if they infringe key pharmaceutical patents. Any mysterious reference to competitive principles would again seem to invite a wide-ranging inquiry that could easily turn this provision of the Tariff Act into an open sesame for infringing products. The 25-year gap between decisions allowing importation of infringing products makes it quite clear that this provision has never been read to invite the broad type of “facts and circumstances inquiry” that the Trade Representative invoked to decide whether to grant or deny injunctive relief.

Against this background, it is critical to note that the dispute in this case boiled down to the question of the scope of Samsung to license its key patent on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory, or FRAND terms, to all comers including Apple. In ordinary cases, no owner of property is required to license or sell its property to a competitor. But for hundreds of years, common carriers have by virtue of their monopoly power been under an obligation to take all passengers on fair and reasonable terms. The thumbnail sketch for this position runs as follows. The obligation to do business on these terms is an offset to the dangers of monopoly power. The prohibition against discrimination is intended to make sure that the common carrier does not duck its obligation by offering its products only at prices so high that it is confident that no passenger will pay them. The concern with nondiscrimination is intended to make sure that the firm does not play favorites among potential customers to whom it can supply the essential service at roughly identical cost.

The carryover of FRAND obligations to the patent space arises only in connection with what are termed “standard-essential patents,” which are those patents that cover an invention that is incorporated in an industry standard that all parties must use in order to market and deploy their own products. The FRAND obligation requires parties to enter into negotiations to make sure that all market participants have a fair shot, so that the owner of the essential patent cannot hold out against a potential user.

In dealing with this issue, the Trade Representative took the position that a White House Report from January 2013 dealing with standard-essential patents revealed the manifest risk of holdout that could take place in these contexts, and recommended a fact-specific inquiry be made into each dispute to determine whether the action of the patent holder was unreasonable under the circumstances. The Trade Representative then extended his discretion further into this situation by insisting that “reverse holdouts” (i.e. those by a potential licensee) should be subject to a similar analysis.

How the Trade Representative Overreaches

It would be foolish to respond to the position of the Trade Representative by saying that there is no holdout risk at stake whenever a party has monopoly power. But there is a vast disagreement over the proper institutional arrangements to deal with these FRAND obligations. The implicit subtext of the Trade Representative’s Report is that holdout is a major risk in these settings that requires some heavy lifting to combat, not only before the ITC, but also in ordinary patent disputes. Just that position was taken by Commissioner Dean Pinkert in dissent below, who relied on some recent work by the well-known Professors Mark Lemley of Stanford and Carl Shapiro of Berkeley, who have proposed major intervention in a form of “final offer baseball arbitration,” whereby the arbitrator chooses between the royalty rates proposed by the two parties.

The obvious point is that this baseball form of arbitration seems ill-suited to determine the complex set of terms that are normally found in any complex licensing agreement. Why propose something that no one has ever used in the voluntary market? But put that point aside, and address the prior question of whether any compulsory remedy is needed to deal with the asserted holdout problem at all. The issue is one to which I have some exposure because I have worked on this question as a legal consultant with Qualcomm. On the strength of that work, and other work of my own on the biomedical anticommons, coauthored with Bruce Kuhlik (now general counsel at Merck), I have concluded that the frequency and severity of this problem is in fact far less than asserted by the overwrought statements of those who advance this theory. In work that I did with Scott Kieff and Dan Spulber, we reported that Qualcomm was a member of some 84 standard organizations and reported few if any problems in working through the details with any of them. Indeed, apart from the citation of a few cases that dealt with tangential issues, there is nothing in the Lemley and Shapiro paper that indicates that this problem has serious dimensions.

The question then arises why this might be so, and the answer is a collection of factors, none of which is decisive but all of which are to some degree relevant. The process of standard-setting does not take place in a vacuum, but involves repeat play by individual firms, all of whom know that coordination is key to their mutual success. The common pattern of standard-setting involves having technical people coming up with a sound technical solution before worrying about who holds what patent position. Standard-setting organizations then require their participants to disclose patents that read onto the standard. These organizations typically revisit standards as circumstances and technology change, which creates a subtle threat for patentees that the standard may migrate away from their patented technology if the patentee’s license terms become too risky. The threat of retaliation is real as well, and all parties know that if they hold up a standard they not only hurt their competitors but also themselves. The process may not look pretty, but in the hands of experienced professionals, the evidence is that it works well.

The choice in question here thus boils down to whether the low rate of voluntary failure justifies the introduction of an expensive and error-filled judicial process that gives all parties the incentive to posture before a public agency that has more business than it can possibly handle. It is on this matter critical to remember that all standards issues are not the same as this particularly nasty, high-stake dispute between two behemoths whose vital interests make this a highly atypical standard-setting dispute. Yet at no point in the Trade Representative’s report is there any mention of how this mega-dispute might be an outlier. Indeed, without so much as a single reference to its own limited institutional role, the decision uses a short three-page document to set out a dogmatic position on issues on which there is, as I have argued elsewhere, good reason to be suspicious of the overwrought claims of the White House on a point that is, to say the least, fraught with political intrigue

Ironically, there was, moreover a way to write this opinion that could have narrowed the dispute and exposed for public deliberation a point that does require serious consideration. The thoughtful dissenting opinion of Commissioner Pinkert pointed the way. Commissioner Pinkert contended that the key factor weighing against granting Samsung an exclusion order is that Samsung in its FRAND negotiations demanded from Apple rights to use certain non standard-essential patents as part of the overall deal. In this view, the introduction of nonprice terms on nonstandard patterns represents an abuse of the FRAND standard. Assume for the moment that this contention is indeed correct, and the magnitude of the problem is cut a hundred or a thousand fold. This particular objection is easy to police and companies will know that they cannot introduce collateral matters into their negotiations over standards, at which point the massive and pointless overkill of the Trade Representative’s order is largely eliminated. No longer do we have to treat as gospel truth the highly dubious assertions about the behavior of key parties to standard-setting disputes.

But is Pinkert correct? On the one side, it is possible to invoke a monopoly leverage theory similar to that used in some tie-in cases to block this extension. But those theories are themselves tricky to apply, and the counter argument could well be that the addition of new terms expands the bargaining space and thus increases the likelihood of an agreement. To answer that question to my mind requires some close attention to the actual and customary dynamics of these negotiations, which could easily vary across different standards. I would want to reserve judgment on a question this complex, and I think that the Trade Representative would have done everyone a great service if he had addressed the hard question. But what we have instead is a grand political overgeneralization that reflects a simple-minded and erroneous view of current practices.

The enormous technical advances in all these fields are not consistent with the claim that holdout problems have brought an industry to a standstill. The brave new world of discretionary remedies could easily backfire and undermine cooperative behavior by rewarding those who refuse to cooperate. If the critics of the current system focused on that one background fact, they might well be more diffident about pushing vast industries into uncharted territories on their regrettable overconfidence in their own untested judgments.

Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is currently consulting with QUALCOMM on the issues at stake in this case.