Do Standard-Essential Patent Owners Behave Opportunistically? Evidence From U.S. District Court Dockets

To what extent and with what effect do owners of standard-essential patents (SEPs) “hold-up” companies that produce standard-compliant products? To explore this question, we construct measures of opportunistic patent licensing behaviors using detailed information collected from the dockets of U.S. patent cases filed (2010–2019) to enforce SEPs and a matched sample of non-SEPs. Overall, we find evidence of at least one opportunistic behavior by the patent enforcer in approximately 77% of SEP and 65% of non-SEP assertions in court. However, these figures mask important heterogeneity across types of conduct. There is significantly more opportunistic conduct that tends to increase a potential licensee’s loss if the patent enforcer prevails in court: 35% of SEP assertions versus 10% of non-SEP assertions. In contrast, conduct that tends to increase a potential licensee’s litigation costs is less common, and the difference between SEP assertions (8%) and non-SEP assertions (6%) is small. We also show that opportunistic behavior is associated with case settlement, with the direction and strength of the correlation depending on the type of opportunistic behavior. Behavior that increases a potential licensee’s litigation costs is associated with an increase in the probability of settlement, while behavior that increases a potential licensee’s loss if the patent enforcer prevails in court is negatively associated with settlement.