Patent Assertion Entity Activity

To facilitate a comparison of the findings corresponding to licenses within a single industry to those
from the overall sample shown in Figure 3.10a, we plotted the results in Figure 3.10b with the same
ordering of the groupings of licensed patents along the x-axis. For example, the set of licensed patents
corresponding to group 1 in Figure 3.10a is identical to the set of licensed patents shown in group 1 in
Figure 3.10b. Not surprisingly, in most cases, there was less variation in patent royalties among
licensees within the same industry. 259 However, there was still frequently substantial variation in the
royalties paid by licensees within the same industry. For example, in group 1 the 90 th percentile was 1.4
(10% of the licensees in the industry paid a royalty at least 1.4 times the mean), and the 25 th percentile
was 0.08 (25% of licensees in the industry paid a license fee of less than 8% of the mean). Although this
variation was less than that observed for all licensees of the patents in group 1, it was still substantial.
Thus, even when limiting the licensees to those operating within the same industry, licensees of identical
patents frequently paid very different royalty amounts.
Study PAE Licensees
The impact of the observed PAE licensing behavior appeared to be concentrated among a small set of
firms. Study PAEs produced data corresponding to 2,715 licenses and approximately 1,400 individual
licensees. Notably, most licensees appeared as a party to only one license in the study data. A small
number of firms, however, entered into multiple licenses with the Responding PAEs or their Affiliates.
This can be seen in Figure 3.11 which shows the frequency with which a given licensee entered into a
license with any Study PAE. For example, while more than 70% of licensees had only one license with
any Study PAE, roughly 2% of licensees entered into more than nine licenses with Study PAEs.
259 th th th th
For example, the differences between the 75 and 25 percentiles and the 90 and 10 percentiles of the licensing
distributions were smaller in most cases when licensees were in the same industry (Figure 3.10b) than when licensees operate
in different of industries (Figure 3.10a). There were, however, two cases where the variation in license fees increased when
we limited the analysis to measuring dispersion within a single industry. For groups 10 and 29, the differences between the
th th th th
75 and 25 percentiles and the 90 and 10 percentiles were larger within the industry with the most licenses when
compared to the larger sample (which contained licenses from licensees operating in multiple industries). In three instances
th th
the difference between the 75 and 25 percentiles increased (patent groups 12, 24, and 33) while the difference between the
th th th th
90 and 10 percentiles decreased, and in three instances the difference between the 90 and 10 percentiles increased
th th
(patent groups 11, 10, and 19) while the difference between the 75 and 25 percentiles decreased.
96