By Severin de Wit Patents are instituted to provide an incentive to innovate, which is important considering that innovation is a key driver for economic prosperity. Yet, what happens if the company that holds the patent right does not want to produce anything, but instead holds-up other patent right holders? Certain combinations of patent rights, […]
Should you devote resources to monitoring your competitors IP?
July 27, 2012 by 1 Comment
By Leonid Kravets A successful business person understands that in order to stay ahead of the competition, he or she must stay informed about the competition. One way to stay informed is to monitor competitors’ publications issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). These publications include published non-provisional patent applications and issued […]
Avoid jointly owned intellectual property like the plague
July 26, 2012 by 1 Comment
By Donal O’Connell Not all the smart people work for you Traditionally, internal innovation was the paradigm in which most companies operated. Most innovating companies kept their discoveries highly secret and made no attempt to assimilate information from outside their own research and development laboratories. This was driven by the belief that “the smart people […]
New Patent Businesses are Diverse and Well-Capitalized
July 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By Bruce Berman A wider range of intelligent businesses are achieving higher returns on patents by extracting direct profits or providing defensive leverage. The Patent Monetization Landscape below is a graphic illustration of these businesses developed by Brody Berman Associates in conjunction with the IP Investment Group at Coller Captial, a London-based private equity firm and one the of the leading independent patent holders. Patent Monetization Landscape […]
Understanding the IP Wars
July 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By Erin-Michael Gill Today, technology companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are getting a scary wake-up call on the importance of IP issues. My personal wake-up call happened in November 2008. The financial crisis was exploding, the hot start-up computer company I worked for, OQO, was in the process of shutting down, and my 19-month-old […]
Eight Species of Patent Strategy – Part 1 the framework
July 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By Bill Meade Introduction: When invited to give a talk for an American Corporate Council Association (which changed its name to the Association of Corporate Council) in 2004 I was asked to speak on “patent strategy.” When I complained “That is a pretty big topic, can you narrow it down a little for me?” the […]
What exactly is IP Strategy anyway?
July 21, 2012 by 1 Comment
By Duncan Bucknell My working definition of ‘IP Strategy’ is ‘using intellectual property to inform and leverage business strategy’. I think it covers the full range of activity that is IP Strategy – what do you think? Here are some definitions previously suggested by others. Do you have any others we should add? What are […]
The Increasing Value of Knowledge Currency
July 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By General Patent Corporation In just the last few years, patents have gone from sleepy assets that many businesses did not even record on their balance sheets, to hot properties. Patents have truly become the “knowledge currency” of the Information Age. And the market – as it always does – has made things right by […]
Facebook’s Patent Acquisitions? They’re More About Google Than Yahoo
July 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By Leonid Kravets Facebook’s patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft. After acquiring 650 AOL patents and patent applications from Microsoft, the company now has approximately 1,400 patent assets. Amazingly, only 46 of these assets (24 issued patents and22 published applications) were originally filed by Facebook. In recent years, Facebook […]
The invisible hand of the intellectual market
July 18, 2012 by 8 Comments
By Ana Popescu While recently reading a post at the excellent IAM blog about the acquisition of Core Wireless Licensing (a Luxemburg based company established by Nokia and holding 400 patents families related to wireless technology) by MOSAID (a Canadian NPE) I came across this sentence: “Critics of NPEs… have always based their condemnation on […]
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