Nations throughout the world receive more patent applications, grant more patents, and entertain more patent infringement lawsuits than ever before. To understand the contemporary patent system, it is crucial to become familiar with how courts and other actors in different countries enable patent owners to enforce their rights. This is increasingly important, not only for firms that seek to market their products worldwide and for the lawyers who provide them with counsel, but also for scholars and policymakers working to develop better policies for promoting the innovation that drives long-term economic growth. Comparative Patent Remedies provides a critical and comparative analysis of patent enforcement in the United States and other major patent systems, including the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and India. Thomas Cotter shows how different countries respond to similar issues, and suggests how economic analysis can assist in adapting current practice to the needs of the modern world. Among the topics addressed are: how courts in various nations award monetary compensation for patent infringement, including lost profits, infringer's profits, and reasonable royalties; the conditions under which patent owners may obtain preliminary and permanent injunctions, including cross-border injunctions in the European Union; the availability of various options for potential defendants to challenge patent validity; and other matters, such as the availability of criminal enforcement and border measures to exclude infringing goods.

Through a collaboration among twenty legal scholars from North America, Europe and Asia, this book presents an international consensus on the use of patent remedies for complex products such as smartphones, computer networks, and the Internet of Things. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In numerous jurisdictions, courts have realized that injunctive relief should not be available automatically in case of patent infringement. Particularly in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision in eBay v. MercExchange, it has become clear that granting an injunction may in some cases enable abuse by patent holders in order to obtain royalties exceeding significantly the value of patent-protected invention or that it may be manifestly against the public interest. This book offers a comparative study of the approaches towards injunctive relief taken by a number of leading jurisdictions, including the United States, the European Union (EU), selected EU Member States (Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Poland), and China, India, Japan and South Korea. Responding to the growing need to provide a comprehensive and flexible framework for the application of injunctive relief, twelve patent law experts, both academics and well-known practitioners familiar with practice in their particular jurisdictions, offer analyses of such elements of patent law injunctions as the following: • access to standard-essential patents; • operations of patent assertion entities; • trolls and patent privateers; • equitable nature of injunctive relief as a source of flexibility; • abuse of right and competition law defences to injunctive relief as sources of flexibility; • analysis of EU instruments that could be used in the interpretation of Member State implementing laws; • conditions for the application of tools such as equity, competition law or general doctrines such as abuse of rights; • circumstances when injunctions should be denied to patentees even though a valid patent was infringed; • complex products cases where patents protect minor parts of the technologies; and • deficiencies and advantages of various approaches to injunctive relief. A proposal for an optimal model of granting injunctions is also included. Given that there is a growing consensus as to the circumstances when injunctions should be available to the patentees and the circumstances when injunctions should be denied, a comprehensive analysis of the various legal doctrines that justify a more flexible approach towards injunctive relief is warranted. This book will give patent law practitioners and in-house counsel the opportunity to draw from the experience of other jurisdictions where courts faced similar problems. Policymakers, patent office officials, academics and researchers in intellectual property law will also welcome this approach.

Over the past two decades, a small but growing number of law-and-economics scholars have begun to apply the standard tools of economic analysis to a field that long had evaded scrutiny by the law-and-economics community, namely the field of comparative law. To date, however, comparative law and economics scholars have devoted relatively little attention to the law of intellectual property - a gap that is in some ways surprising, given the professedly instrumental character of (much of) intellectual property law and policy. This essay, which will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume titled Global Perspectives on Patent Law (Ruth Okediji & Margo Bagley eds., Oxford Univ. Press), presents a modest effort at remedying this state of affairs, by presenting a proposed research agenda for a comparative law and economics analysis of one specific set of issues within the law of intellectual property: the law of patent remedies. Part I lays out a proposed protocol for the use of economic analysis to better understand, evaluate, and critique the law of patent remedies as it exists both in the United States and abroad. Part II focuses on the two principal remedies for patent infringement, permanent injunctions and monetary damages. In particular, Part II outlines the similarities and differences among various nations' approaches to injunctions and damages for patent infringement; suggests some possible explanations for, and consequences of, the perceived differences; and proposes some areas which I plan to explore in greater depth in connection with my own pending book project on the topic.

Based on the dichotomy of the property rule and the liability rule for property rights protection in perspective of Law and Economics, this article proposes that the normative standard of remedies for patent infringement should be in between the two extremes, which might be called “relative property rule”. The original level of specific patent remedy rules, such as lost profits, illicit profits, royalty, etc., in short of legislative or judicial adjustments is much likely to deviate from the normative standard. The U.S. courts grant injunctions according to principles of equity and adjust the damages award actively in order to make the patent remedial level in line with the relative property rule. In comparison, the patent remedial level of China does not conform to the relative property rule in some aspects. The main body of this article is a comparison of remedy rules between the U.S. and China, and will demonstrate that the lost profits damages in China are obviously lower than that of the U.S., but contrary to popular impression, injunctive remedy in China is in a higher level.

The U.S. patent system is in an accelerating race with human ingenuity and investments in innovation. In many respects the system has responded with admirable flexibility, but the strain of continual technological change and the greater importance ascribed to patents in a knowledge economy are exposing weaknesses including questionable patent quality, rising transaction costs, impediments to the dissemination of information through patents, and international inconsistencies. A panel including a mix of legal expertise, economists, technologists, and university and corporate officials recommends significant changes in the way the patent system operates. A Patent System for the 21st Century urges creation of a mechanism for post-grant challenges to newly issued patents, reinvigoration of the non-obviousness standard to quality for a patent, strengthening of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, simplified and less costly litigation, harmonization of the U.S., European, and Japanese examination process, and protection of some research from patent infringement liability.