Introduction:
A critical question repeatedly arises in litigation over the infringement of standard-essential patents (SEPs): What is an intellectually rigorous methodology for apportioning, across the various patents practiced in a multicomponent product, the value that the patents contribute to each enabling technology that gives the multicomponent product value? To address this question, it is necessary to derive an appropriate measure of the patents’ value, relative to the value of other patents that are also essential to the standard. There exist many competing methodologies that purport to do so. We examine various patent-weighting methodologies that rely on forward patent citations to assign a patent’s value. We show that one’s choice of a given methodology is of secondary importance to the anterior question of whether to implement any patent-valuation methodology at all during the apportionment inquiry.
Read the paper: Citation Weighting, Patent Ranking, and Apportionment of Value for Standard-Essential Patents
