Legal Definitions - patent pooling

Definition: Patent pooling is the practice of cross-licensing patents among patent holders. This means that multiple patent owners agree to share their patents with each other, allowing them to use each other's inventions without fear of being sued for patent infringement.

Patent pooling is legal as long as it is not used to suppress competition or control an industry. For example, if a group of companies in the same industry agree to pool their patents together to prevent new competitors from entering the market, this would be considered illegal.

However, if a group of companies in different industries agree to pool their patents together to create a new product or technology, this would be considered legal. For example, in the early days of the automobile industry, several companies pooled their patents together to create the first automatic transmission.

Another example of patent pooling is the MPEG-2 patent pool. This is a group of companies that own patents related to the MPEG-2 video compression standard. By pooling their patents together, they are able to license the technology to other companies without fear of patent infringement lawsuits.