Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Patents play an important role in inducing the investment needed to transform basic discoveries into the practical innovations that contribute to long-term economic growth. But patents also can generate a variety of social costs which, if unchecked, can unnecessarily impede competition, inhibit innovation, impair the integrity of the marketplace, and reduce overall social welfare.</jats:p> <jats:p>This book provides a comprehensive overview of how the leading jurisdictions for patent litigation employ different bodies of law and legal doctrines (including antitrust and unfair competition law, as well as other generally applicable legal principles) to regulate “wrongful patent assertion”: the actual or threatened enforcement of patent rights that harms or threatens to harm a cognizable interest, without sufficient justification. Among the topics discussed are what it means (or should mean) to “enforce” a patent; whether actual or threatened enforcement should be a necessary condition for imposing adverse consequences on the patent owner; what sort of harms should matter in assessing liability; and what it means, or should mean, to say that an assertion is “without justification.” In this regard, the book evaluates a range of claims, defenses, and other doctrines in accordance with which an assertion of rights is deemed to merit the imposition of consequences, in whole or in part because the patent is adjudicated invalid or not infringed ex post, or the assertion enables the owner to extract benefits beyond the patent’s probable ex ante scope; or alternatively, for some reason independent of the patent’s actual or probable validity or infringement.</jats:p>