Patent Law

IP ADR: Pool Patents for Protection, Prevention and Profit

By Les Weinstein, Michael Young, John Leo Wagner, Eric van Ginkel, and Victoria Pynchon

Check out this week's Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article:  Monetizing IP:  The Executive's Challenge here. 

As patent protection becomes more and more costly and less and less certain, innovators are pursuing collaborative agreements to prevent disputes from arising in the first instance.  None of the suggestions contained in this article is a cure-all, but many are enterprising solutions to help companies avoid litigation in the first instance. 

In a patent pool, firms blend their patents with those of other firms. These pools allow users to access a number of firms' patents simultaneously, thereby avoiding the "patent thicket." In many cases, the pooling agreements also specify the pricing schedule in the agreement that establishes the pool, assuring that no party attempts to extract very high fees or to increase its fees after users are locked in.

Patent pools date back as far as the 1850s but have proliferated in recent years. Goods covered by patent pools totaled at least $100 billion in the United States in 2000, while multiple standard-setting bodies today cover virtually every high-technology product. Moreover, the scope of these activities is likely to grow in future years. In many industries, leaders have expressed frustration about the proliferation of patent thickets—the large number of overlapping awards—and the ensuing rise of costly and time-consuming litigation. In many cases, technology sharing has been proposed as a remedy.

Full post as published by IP ADR Blog on June 09, 2008 (boomark / email).