We examine various conceptual issues raised by the “patent wars” that have occurred in recent years in telecommunications. We conclude that “patent wars” are the natural consequence of the multi-invention nature and massive growth of the industry and the probabilistic and...

We respond to a recent proposal by Profs. Lemley and Shapiro for compulsory binding final-offer (baseball-style) arbitration for disputes over licensing FRAND-commited standards-essential patents. We demonstrate that, contrary to their suggestions, their proposal is not "best practices" for any...

In a recent working paper, Profs. Contreras and Gilbert propose a “unified framework” for assessing royalties for both (a) patents that are subject to a FRAND commitment and (b) patents that are not. We believe that these two classes of patents are different (if for no other reason than in...

We discuss the recently developed court-originated legal doctrine that patent infringement damages should use as the damages base the selling price of the “smallest saleable patent practicing unit” (SSPPU). The doctrine appears to have been motivated by concerns that using a broader damages...

We discuss various economic aspects of different types (or taxa) of “patent thickets” identified in a companion article co-authored by one of us. We analogize patent thickets to “tangible input thickets” (in which manufacturers of complex products need a large number of different...

The recent decisions in the Apple v. Motorola, Motorola v. Microsoft, In Re Innovatio, and Ericsson v. D-Link cases have offered much-needed guidance on U.S. courts' interpretation of what constitutes F/RAND licensing terms in the standard-setting context. In this paper, we have discussed the...

Game theory is the study of situations with multiple decision makers, and each player's payoff depends on what other players do. A multistage game is one in which the decision makers make their decisions in multiple stages