Research On The Legal Regulations Of Non-Practicing Entity’s Patent Litigation Behavior

Nowadays,patents have become the object of technology transaction.Compared with the technical value of patents,many market players attach more importance to the commercial value and circulation value of patents.The commercialization of patents and the refinement of social division of labor gave birth to patent operating agencies,and non-practicing entities(NPEs)emerged at the very moment.They dedicated to patent aggregation and do not per se make the product and in many cases don’t actually engage in developing the technology at all.Many of these entities purchase patent rights in bulk,then after integration,they license or transfer the patent rights they hold to practicing entities.NPEs use patent licensing as the main source of profit.However,the development of NPE has always been anti-NPE animus in the industry.On the one hand,NPE has indeed activated the patent monetization market.But on the other hand,NPE is the major driver of patent litigation in developed countries,it asserts loaded patent infringement litigation when fails to collect licensing fees.In light of this circumstance a series of abuse of litigation rights have arisen.China’s consideration of the litigation behavior of NPE and their solutions are all at the preliminary stage,and there is no large-scale NPE litigation problems in legal practice.Therefore,this article mainly adopts the comparative research method,taking the United States as the reference for the more prominent NPE litigation issues.Nevertheless,the NPE problem is rare in China does not mean it’s not important,there are confirmed facts imply that foreign NPEs have entered the domestic market lay low for patent deployment,and local companies have begun to take the shape of Chinese-version of NPE in their business model.There is no doubt that as long as patent operations continue to improve,meanwhile the patent law tends to strongly pro patent owners,it is inevitable that NPE litigation will increase in the domestic market,and it is necessary to study NPE litigation problems.Focusing on the regulation of non-practicing entity’s litigation,this paper is consist of four chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.In the first chapter,this paper discuss the legal attributes of NPE,and analyze its meaning,characteristics,classification and business strategy.This chapter also focuses on the difference between NPE and other relevant labels such as "patent assertion entity" and"patent troll".An objective view of the positive and negative effects of NPE is a prerequisite for regulation.The second chapter analyzes the NPE’s litigation behavior.The legality and rationality of NPE,which triggers disputes about risks and resistance,will be discussed in this chapter.The third chapter focuses on the point of dispute,that is,further research on the possible malicious litigation,how to define the bad faith litigation of NPE,and the specific manifestation of the bad faith litigation of NPE.Chapter four is to sort out the parts of the current legislation that can regulate NPE’s bad faith litigation.Based on this fact then learns some lessons from foreign legislation on NPE and proposes legal paths that can be regulated in response to specific problems in NPE litigation.