Uncertainty about the essentiality of patents stimulates firms to bring weak patents to standards as shown by Dewatripont and Legros (2008). Particular licensing rules, such as “numeric proportionality” can make problems with multiplicity of trivial and non-valuable patents in standards even worse (Layne-Farrar, Padilla and Schmalensee, 2006). These findings suggest that both the rules for inclusion of patents and the regulation of compensation to IPRs incorporated in standards are potentially of great importance.
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