Blog Post
New inventions build on earlier inventions, so patent citations are one indication of who is standing on whose shoulders. We show that four low-carbon technologies (wind, solar, electric vehicles and batteries) exhibit markedly different patterns of citation behaviour. If technology spillovers are structurally different between sectors, this could imply that policies to support innovation clusters would need different approaches. Differentiated policies could range from promoting individual champions for technologies with strong internal spillovers, to supporting regional eco-systems for technologies with more fuzzy spillovers.
Past Event
Bruegel together with the Association for Competition Economics (ACE), is hosting an event on standardization and SEP licensing.
Past Event
The patent system is never out of the spotlight. Do patents achieve their ultimate goal of incentivising innovation, or actually stifle it? The debate is especially heated in the ICT sector...
Blog Post
Today the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will rule on a dispute between Chinese tech companies Huawei and ZTE regarding a patent “essential” to the “Long Term Evolution” (LTE) wireless broadband technology standard.
Blog Post
Bruegel contributes to the stream of research on PATSTAT by providing two algorithms that try to minimize the amount of manual work that has to be performed. We also provide data obtained by the application of these methods.
Working Paper
The inventors in PATSTAT are often duplicates: the same person or company may be split into multiple entries in PATSTAT, each associated to different patents. In this paper, we address this problem with an algorithm that efficiently de-duplicates the data.
Blog Post
The Commission, in its role as regulator, should mandate standard-setting organisations to define the details of FRAND ‘contracts’ compatible with EU competition law. Enforcing those contracts would then naturally not create any institutional tension between the Commission and national courts.
Video
Earlier in March, the European Commission announced it was planning to issue two antitrust decisions over the use of standard-essential patents. The decisions concern the Google-Motorola and the Samsung cases. Commissioner Joaquín Almunia himself announced one of the decisions will seek a commitment while the other one will be, for the first time, a prohibition Ahead […]
Blog Post
Standards and standard-setting processes play a key role in fostering European economic development. Standards ensure interoperability of networks and often give rise to significant reductions in transaction and production costs.
Blog Post
On December 11th the European Parliament approved the proposal made by the Competitiveness Council at Ministerial level to create a “unitary” patent that would cover 25 member states (Spain and Italy opposed the system due to languages reasons). SMEs will in addition benefit from lower fees.
Video
After more than 30 years of negotiations, the European Union is closer to having a unified patent system. After the agreement on translation requirements for the EU Patent back in December 2011, negotiations are now focusing on patent courts and litigation rules. In this video, Research Fellow Bruno van Pottelsberghe explains why it has taken […]
Blog Post
What’s at stake: Apple’s recent victory in its ongoing dispute over IP rights with Samsung has received a great deal of attention from regulators, academics and the media worldwide. It is, however, just one of the many battles of an ongoing war in the IT sector over intellectual protection. Standard economic analysis sees IP protection as a trade-off between securing a fair reward for innovators while ensuring that future innovation is not jeopardized and that customers pay a fair price. Although the aim of the patent system is to strike the right balance between these two broad objectives, recent developments – for example patent trolls, patent thickets and ambush strategies – suggest that the balance has tipped towards incumbents.