Fiona Scott Morton and Carl Shapiro, 79 Antitrust Law Journal 463, 2014
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In recent years, we have seen a dramatic upsurge of “strategic patent acquisitions.” We define this as the acquisition of a portfolio of patents reading on a specified area such as flash memory, biosensors, database management, or wireless digital messaging, which may be asserted against “target products” in that area. In this article, we examine the economic effects of strategic patent acquisitions and discuss their antitrust implications.