Main Event - Dietmar Harhoff (Max Planck Institute)
To Opt Out or Not – Strategic Decisions at the Unified Patent Court
Speaker Bio
Dietmar Harhoff is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, where he heads the Economic Research Department (Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research). He is also an honorary professor of business administration at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. His research focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, industrial economics, and economic policy.
To Opt Out or Not – Strategic Decisions at the Unified Patent Court
Abstract
The new Unified Patent Court (UPC) in Europe allows patent owners access to centralized enforcement, albeit at the risk of centralized invalidation. For new unitary patents (UPs) owners will enjoy a large cost reduction. At the introduction of the UPC/UP system, owners of existing European patents and patent applications were able to opt-out of the new court system during a three-month time window. We derive a set of hypotheses and combine data on the actual opt-out decisions with a rich set of patent and owner characteristics to test them. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we find that patents with high risk of invalidation were typically opted out, as were valuable patents, e.g., with large patent families and with supplementary protection certificates (SPCs). Non-European patent owners had a strong preference for the new system.
Social event will follow at: 18:00 (post-seminar)
Complimentary aperitivo at GT Bistrot & Café, Via Guglielmo Röntgen, 6. A Young Scholar Initiative (YSI) event.
Note: For organizational efficiency, registration is important. Upon registration, you will receive an entry form to allow immediate access to the seminar premises on the day of the event. The complimentary aperitivo has limited space, available on a first-come, first-served basis, with registered seminar attendees receiving priority. However, participation in the seminar remains possible also without registration and the aperitivo will be, in the worst case, at the at the expense of the participants.
