IP Topics
By
Stuart J. Sinder,
Michelle Carniaux and
Shawn W. O'Dowd
- 2007
The global business and financial communities have increasingly begun to recognise the inherent independent value of intellectual property assets and especially patent rights. The focus in some fields is shifting from using patent rights to exclude competitors from copying a company’s patented products to finding ways to more directly ‘monetise’ these rights. The primary value of a patent was traditionally viewed in terms of its ability to prevent competitors from copying the patented product. Most patent systems were designed with the aim of providing the inventor with the exclusive right to manufacture and market the invention. In recent years, companies have increasingly focused on the use of patents as a profit centre, independent of the patent owner’s business and the patent’s applicability to the patentee’s own products. Historically, individual inventors, small businesses and patent holding companies were the first to use this practice of obtaining or acquiring patents for the purpose of generating income from licensees. These patent owners had no fear of reprisal from exposure to the prospective licensees’ patents. More recently, larger companies have begun to view their patent portfolios as sources of income, and as a way of paying for the cost of obtaining and maintaining patent rights on a global basis. Some companies have been able to achieve huge licensing income streams, measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, despite their own potential exposure to the patent rights of their licensing targets.