Assessing the Link Between Standards and Patents

Abstract

Some policymakers, courts, and academics have expressed concerns that when a firm’s patents are incorporated into a standard, the patents gain importance and can bestow on the patent holder market power that can be abused when the standard is commercialized. This paper extends the existing literature on the effect that standards can have on patents. This analysis has two aims: first, to better understand how an SSO might confer importance on included patents and second, to move closer to an empirical understanding of the impact of a standard on included patents. The authors create a dataset of patents named to voluntary standard setting organizations, as well as the patent pools that sometimes develop around such standards. The authors rely on proxies to capture a patent’s importance or value.