Patent Pools cause free riding
Katarina Mikolajova 16, Katarina Mikolajova got her paper published by the Stanford Law School, 6-22-2016, "No. 22: The Treatment of Software Patent Pools under the United States Antitrust and the European Union Competition Laws", Stanford Law School, https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-treatment-of-software-patent-pools-under-the-united-states-antitrust-and-the-european-union-competition-laws//susu
Certain industries are said to be forced to rely on pools.121 As Steven Carlson argues, “in standard-dependent technologies, such as the MPEG protocol, there is essentially no choice but to deal with the patent pool.”122 This can also amount to a violation of abuse of dominance provisions.
Where horizontal competitors pool their patents, competition for licensees is reduced—and even where a patent holder retains the right to license outside of the pool there may not be much incentive to do so.123 Where the right to license out of the pool does not exist, this could discourage innovation.124 Moreover, where the pool requires the members to grant licences to each other for present and future technologies (“grant-back”) at minimal cost or without an adequate reward, this may further disincentivise members to engage in research and development or cost-reducing process and product innovations and lead them to just freeride on the works of others.125