The causal effect of including standards-related documentation into patent prior art: evidence from a recent EPO policy change

The aim of this paper is to investigate the causal effect of a recent attempt under- taken by the EPO to improve the quality of the patent granting process, by including the information revealed during the standardisation-setting process into the official definition of prior art. We build counterfactuals through a twin-patents approach, exploiting the fact that the same invention is filed for patent at both the EPO and at the USPTO, where the policy change did not take place. Our empirical analysis con- sistently support that the policy was successful. Indeed, we find a strongly significant reduction of about 10% in the granting rates, suggesting that the process of patent granting has become more careful and selective after the policy implementation.