Introduction - Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus

Biddle, Brad; Cotter, Thomas F.; Contreras, Jorge L.; Love, Brian J.; Siebrasse, Norman

Introduction - Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus

Forthcoming, Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus, Introduction (Brad Biddle, Jorge L. Contreras, Brian J. Love, and Norman V. Siebrasse, eds., Cambridge University Press)

7 Pages Posted: 26 Nov 2018

See all articles by Brad Biddle

Brad Biddle

Arizona State University (ASU) - College of Law

Jorge L. Contreras

University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law

Norman Siebrasse

University of New Brunswick - Fredericton - Faculty of Law

Date Written: October 29, 2018

Abstract

This introductory chapter to the forthcoming book _Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus_ describes how innovative companies routinely bring products to market that implicate tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual patents issued by patent offices across the globe, and identifies a number of challenging questions with respect to how the law should value patents and provide remedies for their infringement in this context. For example, how should courts and, where applicable, juries calculate damages for infringement of one patent out of the thousands of (often complementary) inventions incorporated in a device? How can courts and juries tell if one feature among hundreds drove the sale of the entire product? Should patent law take into consideration that it might not be possible, let alone cost effective, for a product manufacturer in a fast-moving field to license all of the thousands of patents embodied in its product, even prior to beginning development? Should an injunction be granted to prevent the use of a patented technology that covers a minor feature of a complex product, when the effect of the injunction would be to keep the entire product itself off the market? How (if at all) can the risks of patent holdup be reduced without generating substantial error costs or other unintended negative consequences? This chapter describes the broader goals of the book - to begin to addressing these questions systematically by setting forth both the current state of the law and an agenda for future research - and identifies a set of foundational premises applicable across all of the book's chapters.

Keywords: patent, remedies, injunctions, royalties, damages, holdup, international

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Biddle, Brad and Cotter, Thomas F. and Contreras, Jorge L. and Love, Brian J. and Siebrasse, Norman, Introduction - Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus (October 29, 2018). Forthcoming, Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus, Introduction (Brad Biddle, Jorge L. Contreras, Brian J. Love, and Norman V. Siebrasse, eds., Cambridge University Press) , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3274902