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| The Problems and Solutions of the Open License System for Green Patents: An Analysis from the Perspective of Transaction Costs |
| Wang Anna |
| School of Civil Engineering, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou 215009, China |
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Abstract The open license is an innovative patent licensing model, with the institutional advantage of reducing transaction costs, is an important way to promote the exploitation of green patent licensing. The paper studies the open license of green patents from the perspective of transaction cost, which is developed as follows:In the first part, it is argued that the transaction costs of green patent license are the lowest in an open licensing model, which justifies the legitimacy of the open licensing system. Compared to an ordinary license and a compulsory license, an open license has the advantage of lower transaction costs, because the value of each individual cost in an open license can always equal the minimum one. When green patents are connected with environmental standards, an open license is also the ideal licensing model to minimize transaction costs. The demonstration of the transaction cost advantage of open licenses of green patents is the innovation of this paper.In the second part, empirical analysis is conducted on the practices of green patent open licenses, which are categorized as two types, namely, the enterprise-led and the government-led, and their respective features are also summarized. The transaction costs of the two practical modes mentioned above are analyzed by an established functional model, which reveals that in order to minimize the transaction costs of open licensing, we should respect the essential role of the market and activate the endogenous willingness and enhance the capability of enterprises to adopt open licenses by taking advantage of governmental incentives, so as to promote the sustainable development of open license practices with lower transaction costs.In the third part, the open license for green patents also faces three problems, which seriously undermines the efficacy of the system that is supposed to be provided by the open license. First of all, the lack of clarity in the attributes of a written declaration regarding an open license, increases uncertainty in the contracting process, thus leading to contracting disputes and extra contracting costs. And also, the limited number of patents which can be licensed under an open license model undermines the transaction cost advantage of the open license system. The last but not the least, the insufficient incentives are detrimental to reducing the transaction costs of the open license.In the fourth part, specific solutions were proposed to resolve the difficulties faced by the green patent open licenses, in order to achieve the goal of minimizing transaction costs. First, by analyzing the terms in the patent license contract, and the details of the patents’ open license information form and the process of contracting, it is concluded that an open license declaration should be defined as an offer. Second, in order to overcome the limits of the number of green patents, it is necessary to look for more suitable green patents and establish a market evaluation mechanism for the value of green patents. At the same time, it is useful to support the construction of a platform for open licenses for green patents and a tracking assessment system for the implementation of open license contracts, so as to create a favorable institutional environment for open licenses for as many green patens as possible. Third, it is helpful to make the most use of the patent insurance system and its relevant incentive measures to lead to a benign change of the incentive mechanism from the government-led mode to the market-led mode, which plays an essential role in updating the open license system.Studying the green patent open license system from the perspective of transaction cost is a brave effort, which complements the theoretical research at the intersection of green innovation, environmental protection and intellectual property rights, and will also offer valuable reference for follow-up researches on the open license of other kinds of emerging technologies in those transformational fields.
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Received: 30 January 2024
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2025, Vol. 55 
