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When Courts Price Technology: Evidence from Reasonable Royalty Articulation in U.S. Patent Opinions (2005–2025)

Research Paper

PRPS-2026-02

Amrutha Moorthy

Overview

Direct transaction prices for patents and technology licences are frequently confidential, leaving researchers and practitioners dependent on indirect measures of patent value. Judicial opinions provide a different form of observable evidence: in some disputes, courts discuss reasonable-royalty doctrine and, in a smaller subset, articulate explicit monetary amounts. This study constructs a linked dataset covering 420 damages-relevant U.S. federal patent opinions from 2005–2025, connecting opinions to litigated patents and extracted damages signals. Of the 420 opinions, 103 mention reasonable royalty and 34 state an explicit numeric reasonable-royalty amount. The paper examines the incidence of those signals, their distribution, differences between opinions that do and do not discuss reasonable royalty, patent bundling and the valuation logic visible in the text. The study is intentionally descriptive. Judicial awards are treated as publicly observable institutional valuation signals rather than as a comprehensive measure of the underlying economic value of patents. This distinction allows the paper to examine what courts make visible about technology pricing while retaining clear limits on what can be inferred from litigated outcomes alone.

Citation

Moorthy, A. (2026). When Courts Price Technology: Evidence from Reasonable Royalty Articulation in U.S. Patent Opinions (2005–2025). Patenti Research Paper Series, PRPS-2026-02. Patenti Technology Solutions.

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