Intellectual Property

Patent Misuse

A patent owner may be alleged to have wrongly used its patent rights in an attempt to injure competitors or to extend its patent protection beyond that patent's product, geographic, or temporal bounds. This alleged wrongful use may include, for example, attempts to monopolize a market, interference with another company's customer relationships, and/or attempts to extent its rights such that it is attempting to reduce rivals' abilities to sell other products. NERA economists have been asked to assess damages to the claimed injured party flowing from these types of conduct. We are frequently retained to assess both liability issues (e.g., market definition, market power, likelihood of anticompetitive effects) and damages in connection with patent misuse claims.