6,630 research outputs found
Licensing Complementary Patents: “Patent Trolls”, Market Structure, and “Excessive” Royalties
The infamous Blackberry case brought new attention to so-called “patent trolls” and began the general association of trolls with “non-practicing” patent holders. This has had important legal consequences: Namely, patent holders have been denied injunctive relief because they did not practice the patents themselves. In this paper we analyze how patent holders –– both non-practicing and vertically integrated –– choose their royalties depending on the structure of the upstream and downstream markets and the types of licensing agreements available. We show that a vertically integrated firm has an incentive to raise its rivals’ costs and to restrict entry on the downstream market; incentives that do not hold for non-integrated patent holders. An automatic presumption that a non-integrated patent holder will charge higher royalties than a vertically integrated company is therefore unfounded. Whether a company charges “excessive” royalties depends on whether there is scope for hold-up, either because of sunk investments on the part of potential licensees or because of “weak” patents held by the licensor. These factors are orthogonal to whether patent holders are practicing or no
Scattering from a Domain Wall in a Spontaneously Broken Gauge Theory
We study the interaction of particles with a domain wall at a
symmetry-breaking phase transition by perturbing about the domain wall
solution. We find the particulate excitations appropriate near the domain wall
and relate them to the particles present far from the wall in the uniform
broken and unbroken phases. For a quartic Higgs potential we find analytic
solutions to the equations of motion and derive reflection and transmission
coefficients. We discover several bound states for particles near the wall.
Finally, we apply our results to the electroweak phase transition in the
standard model.Comment: 48 pages, 10 figures, LaTeX / epsf, revised to include references to
earlier related wor
Detecting Gluino-Containing Hadrons
When SUSY breaking produces only dimension-2 operators, gluino and photino
masses are of order 1 GeV or less. The gluon-gluino bound state has mass
1.3-2.2 GeV and lifetime > 10^{-5} - 10^{-10} s. This range of mass and
lifetime is largely unconstrained because missing energy and beam dump
techniques are ineffective. With only small modifications, upcoming K^0 decay
experiments can study most of the interesting range. The lightest
gluino-containing baryon (uds-gluino) is long-lived or stable; experiments to
find it and the uud-gluino are also discussed.Comment: 13 pp, 1 figure (uuencoded). Descendant of hep-ph/9504295,
hep-ph/9508291, and hep-ph/9508292, focused on experimental search
techniques. To be published in Phys Rev Let
Licensing Complementary Patents: “Patent Trollsâ€, Market Structure, and “Excessive†Royalties
The infamous Blackberry case brought new attention to so-called “patent trolls†and began the general association of trolls with “non-practicing†patent holders. This has had important legal consequences: Namely, patent holders have been denied injunctive relief because they did not practice the patents themselves. In this paper we analyze how patent holders –– both non-practicing and vertically integrated –– choose their royalties depending on the structure of the upstream and downstream markets and the types of licensing agreements available. We show that a vertically integrated firm has an incentive to raise its rivals’ costs and to restrict entry on the downstream market; incentives that do not hold for non-integrated patent holders. An automatic presumption that a non-integrated patent holder will charge higher royalties than a vertically integrated company is therefore unfounded. Whether a company charges “excessive†royalties depends on whether there is scope for hold-up, either because of sunk investments on the part of potential licensees or because of “weak†patents held by the licensor. These factors are orthogonal to whether patent holders are practicing or not
Connection between a possible fifth force and the direct detection of Dark Matter
If there is a fifth force in the dark sector and dark sector particles
interact non-gravitationally with ordinary matter, quantum corrections
generically lead to a fifth force in the visible sector. We show how the strong
experimental limits on fifth forces in the visible sector constrain the direct
detection cross section, and the strength of the fifth force in the dark
sector. If the latter is comparable to gravity, the spin-independent direct
detection cross section must typically be <~ 10^{-55} cm^2. The anomalous
acceleration of ordinary matter falling towards dark matter is also
constrained: \eta_{OM-DM} <~ 10^{-8}.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. v3: contains a more detailed treatment of the
spin-dependence of the effective interaction between dark matter and ordinary
matte
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