Patent Licensing and Patent Litigation: an Empirical Study of Panel Data from Provinces of Mainland China

In recent years, patent litigation has evolved from simply being a traditional means of intellectual property protection to becoming a new tool used in competition. This transformation has had a profound impact on patent implementation and industrializa-tion. In this study, the process of submission, trial and judgment of patent litigation is analysed; the characteristics involved in patent litigation are also extracted. Taking Chinese provincial panel data as the research sample, a regression model of litigation characteristics and patent licensing is constructed by analyzing the characteristic fields of patent litigation. The results show that the numbers of trials and compensation awards of patent litigations have a significant negative influence on patent licensing in China. Regional differences exist in the influence of patent litigation characteristics on patent licensing. Compared with China’s western region, the above litigation char-acteristics have a more significant impact on patent licensing in eastern and central re-gions. This means that reducing the numbers of trials and decreasing compensation awards of patent litigations will help to promote patent licensing in China.