Katznelson on Lemley/Feldman paper on licensing

Ron Katznelson has a guest post at IPWatchdog.

There is a citation to

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Sampat, B. N. and Ziedonis, A. A. (2005). Patent Citations and the Economic Value of Patents. In Moed, H. F., Glänzel, W., and Schmoch, U., Eds., Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, pages 277–298. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
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Related to patent citations to university patents.

Given that patent citations work differently than journal citations (recall watermelons paper), any discussion of patent citations may be problematic.

Ron did note:


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Feldman & Lemley’s survey responses are mostly from non-coordinating parties and entities having much less relevance for development of the specific patented technologies. Consequently, for example, the survey’s findings on university patent licensing belie clear empirical evidence that technology licensing (not only by reluctant infringers) of patented technologies contributes to innovation and development: Sampat and Ziedonis (2005) examined patent citations to university-owned patents. They found that citations were elevated for licensed patents. Moreover, most citations occurred after the patent was licensed. That licensing of patented technology increases its diffusion and relevance more broadly is supported by Drivas et al. (2014), who found that citations by non–licensees to patents exclusively licensed (either by geographic area or field of use) by the University of California increased after the licenses were executed. These are objective empirical indicia – not subjective responses to selective surveys by accused infringers.

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Separately, note Sampat and Lemley had a paper on patent examination.

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Note separately the licensing paper by Mowery.


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Also, from Bhaven N. Sampat, 53 J. Law & Econ. 399 (2010) :

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In addition to differences across fields, there is also considerable intra industry heterogeneity in the private value of patent protection (Scherer and Harhoff 2000). To assess whether applicants are more likely to submit prior art for more important inventions, I construct three patent-specific measures of importance for a subset of the sample patents: the 23,703 patents granted in January and February 2001 that were assigned to a firm or organization at the time of issue. n7

The first independent variable is a count of the number of citations that each of these patents received in subsequent patents issued by December 31, 2004. Forward-citation counts are a commonly used measure of the importance of inventions, and they appear to be good predictors of other measures of an invention's importance, including whether it is licensed (Sampat and Ziedonis 2004), consumer surplus based on an invention (Trajtenberg 1990), and other measures (Lanjouw and Schankerman 2004). On average, these patents received 3.4 forward citations between 2001 and 2004.

A second measure of a patent's importance is a binary variable indicating whether it was renewed after 4 years. After a patent is issued, the patent holder must periodically pay maintenance fees to keep it in force. Currently in the United States, these fees must be paid 4, 8, and 12 years after issue. The renewal-based measure of importance assumes that, all else equal, patents that are more economically valuable are more likely to be renewed at any given point in time (Lanjouw, Pakes, and Putnam 1998). More than one-half of patents issued expire before their full 20-year term because the applicant chooses not to pay maintenance fees (Moore 2004). Of the patents issued in January and February 2001, 87 percent were renewed at 4 years.

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In passing, one notes the discrepancy in the "year" of publication. The 2010 paper cites: Sampat, Bhaven, and Arvids Ziedonis. 2004. Patent Citations and the Economic Value of Patents: A Preliminary Assessment. Pp. 277-98 in Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, edited by Henk F. Moed, Wolfgang Glanzel, and Ulrich Schmoch. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

but the above cites 2005.

--Of "watermelons", from a 2004 post on IPBiz

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Better put out the bat signal for Edlyn Simmons and Nancy Lambert to put down this latest fire of stupidity. However, as Edlyn stated:

Evaluating an individual patent can't be done without knowledge about whether the patent is a grape or a watermelon. But
business people like easy, quantitative answers, ...

[so here we go again, but refer to

Edlyn S. Simmons and Nancy Lambert. "Patent Statistics: Comparing Grapes and Watermelons" In Recent Advances in Chemical Information, Proceedings of the 1991 Montreux International Chemical Information Conference & Exhibition, H. Collier, Ed, (Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge; CRC Press) pp 33-78 (1992).

Simmons, Edlyn S.; Lambert, Nancy. "Comparing grapes and watermelons." ChemTech 23 (6), 1993, p. 51-59. ]
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link: http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2004/09/there-they-go-again-patent-citation.html

Note that Sampat did not cite the Simmons/Lambert work, or any of the other papers critical of the use of patent citation analysis.