Intellectual Property Rights and the Rule of Law

The subject of this conference is the “Rule of Law”, so I would like to address my opening comments to a trending narrative that casts opposition to the demands of patent holders as a form of lawlessness. This narrative specifically takes aim at a practice that has been termed “efficient infringement” – the idea that a firm may rationally decide to infringe patents either because it will be too costly for the patent holder to enforce its rights in court, or because it is happy to take its chances in court, where an asserted patent may be invalidated and where damages eventually assessed against the infringer years later will likely be no higher than the royalties that the infringer would have paid anyway under a licensing agreement.