In 1999 Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US Federal Reserve, delivered a speech at Harvard University entitled “Transcending all else is being principled”. In it he said of reputation “In today’s world, where ideas are increasingly displacing the physical in the production of economic value, competition for reputation becomes a significant driving force, propelling our economy forward. Manufactured goods often can be evaluated before the completion of a transaction. Service providers, on the other hand, usually...

Every now and then the ipeg blog pays attention to innovation. Although some of our readers think this is not something for a patent blog (we recently were commented by a known blogger in the US that ipeg could not be counted among the top ten patent blogs as we publish not solely on patents and not ‘frequently” enough[1]), we think innovation is a subject worth paying attention to for a patent blog. Weren’t we told at university that patents spur innovation, a long held adagio that seems to be increasingly questioned these...

Assume you are a patent broker. You are being approached by a party who is extremely enthusiastic about his patent, it’s the invention that will change the world, where anyone has been waiting for or that multiple parties use (read: infringe). However he tried to sell himself but he either did not get any bid, or thought the bids he did get were too low. So, he engages an IP broker. As any broker works in the world, he only takes the job if he thinks the patent is sellable, that there is a market. The broker will require a...

In the IP Legal World Top Ten Lists are a staple of a culture obsessed with ranking. The IP legal world (patent attorneys, IP trial lawyers and their European counterparts) are used to do whatever it takes to show up on Top Lists of Best This And That, simply to stay competitive, to be known and, most of all, to get recognition from peers. Whether customers in fact choose any of their IP counsel by exclusively relying on those Top Whatever Lists is, as far as we know, the Big Unknown. Surely, many corporate counsel will check...

CIP Forum 2009, currently held in Goteborg, Sweden, covers lot of IP management issues from valuation, open innovation and the relationship with IP, and of course contributions where the Patent Troll prominently appears as the bad guys. No IP forum these days can go bye without at least at some occasion hit on the trolls. Patent trolls or NPEs (Non Practicing Entities[1]) are bad, as they do not innovate, is what we learn. True or not, it misses the point. We like to compare NPEs with Real Estate management companies (“Agents”)....

How come licensing by European companies is largely lagging behind the US? A March 2009 OECD Study on licensing practice by European and Japanese patent holders tells the story. Zuniga and Guellec published a their study [1], “Who Licenses out Patent and Why?” using the outcome of the OECD survey (done in 2007). 600 European companies, 1.600 Japanese companies have been surveyed by the researchers from OECD, EPO and University of Tokyo. Overall, the study finds that approx. 20%[2] of European companies holding patents license...

What have canisters of milk and patents in common? Guess you figured, not much. Wrong. Like a date stamped on a can of milk after which it should not be sold, patents have their similar “pull dates” as, like milk, patents are perishable goods. Take the recent demise of yet another European “gem” in the semiconductor industry, Qimonda AG, Germany’s DRAM maker, an Infineon subsidiary. You were, for years among the most important and well known semiconductor companies in Europe. …

Chinese utility model holder Chint completed its major victory at the Zhejiang High People’s Court in Chint v. Schneider over French competitor Schneider through an unprecedented $ 23 million settlement (RMB 157 million), approximately half the damages awarded two years ago by the Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court. Interestingly, in a 2007 publication, Harold Wegner and Sharon R. Bamer explain the details of the lower court proceeding and the practical implications of Chinese utility model law protection. …

Investment in IP as an asset class has grown significantly over the last years, however it is still in its infancy. Analysis of historical returns remains difficult, as limited data are available. Therefore, it is challenging to predict how the current economic crisis will impact on attitudes of institutional investors and the development of the asset class. What effect will this have on market perceptions (and valuations) of IP assets? Dependent on how strong the aftereffects of the financial crisis are, there are two possibilities....

Auctions to sell assets have been known for long. Goethe proposed the publisher Vieweg in 1797 to sell his manuscript of his poem Hermann and Dorothea via an auction (later to become known as “a second-price auction”). In IP no doubt auctions have become a household practice thanks to Ocean Tomo’s regular auctions of patents. They at least deserve praise for being the facilitator of “EBay” type of auctions of IP assets saleable like any other asset. And the public acknowledgement that comes with...

Would a change in accounting rules, as they are now being discussed, have an impact on the role IP can play as a collateral for (new) debts? The current financial crisis has brought about a call for easing the accounting rules on fair value of assets (meaning that companies have to mark most of their financial holdings to market prices). Those who are in favor of easing the accounting rules on fair value claim that fair value has undermined banks’ balance sheets by forcing them to report assets at current (weak) market...

We noticed over the last two years an increase in investment houses to invest in IP as an asset class showing quite interesting and different risk profiles. We continue to see parties tapping on this new interest finding appropriate business models to develop IP monetization strategies. The different models become clearer by time. We have the non practicing entities. We blogged earlier about this. As a category its way too diverse to be a helpful “definition”. The term “Patent troll” is something we just...

Increasingly we see the term “IP strategist”. So we did a quick round in our network in the IP community to form an idea of what we collectively would consider a good IP strategist.  What do we understand to be a good IP strategist? What is in fact an “IP Strategist”? The concept of strategy has been borrowed from the military and adapted for use in business.  The word “strategy” comes from the Greek strategia, meaning “generalship.” …

Netherlands is known for its vast knowledge on water technology and water management skills, like off-shore civil engineering, flood control, coastal zone engineering, desalting for drinking water projects and industrial water supply projects. The Dutch battle against the sea resulted in major “Delta works”, they are known for their “impoldering” (land reclamation) . The Maeslantdam or “Maeslandkering” (two enormous steel constructions as lockable gates to the river Maas) are another example...

Last week the Wall Street Journal revealed that a group of tech companies got together to incorporate a new group, called Allied Security Trust. The way it is being described, see the WSJ Law Blog, is that the companies, among which Cisco, Google, Verizon, buy patents they fear might be used against them by patent trolls or NPE’s (non practicing entities, rather like that term, see our earlier blog). Each member puts money in the basket to acquire those patents. All members get a license right to use the acquired patent(s)....

Patent Valuation is the subject of many debate. With over a 100 methods of “valuing” patents, its difficult to find any good yardstick by which to measure the value of a patent. After all, like many other difficult questions its not only who you ask but also in which context the issue arises. I guess a lawyerish answer on “how much value has a patent?” probably is right on: “it depends”. From a defensive perspective if one considers patents to be crucial for freedom to operate, numbers count....

Now the Irish are voting today on the Lisbon Treaty, and some questions arise whether there will be a vote from the heart or from the brains, we took the opportunity to look into the Lisbon Treaty text to see what has been said about intellectual property. The Treaty of Lisbon amends the Treaty on European Union (TEU) (essentially the Treaty of Maastricht) and the Treaty establishing the European Community (TEC) (essentially the Treaty of Rome), which is renamed the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). …

In Europe the heated discussion on business method patents and software patents basically died after the European Parliament rejected the controversial draft directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions in July 2005. This vote ended more than three years of legislative procedure and intense debate between the Member States, large companies and SMEs, various organizations and lobby groups, economists, lawyers, IT professionals and even EU institutions. For an overview of the issues which were debated in 2004-2005,...

Two European trademark blogs, MarkenBlog and Class 46 referred to a publication in Germany’s business newspaper Handelsblatt on the effect of the proposed new “Bilanzrichtlinien modernisierungs gesetz” (Accounting Directives Modernizations Law). According to the two blogs this introduces new accounting rules for small and medium sized companies how and when to report development costs of their intellectual property on their corporate balance sheet. …

Tomorrow, Monday February 11, Arnaud Gasnier, receives his PhD at Technical University Delft (TU Delft) for a study on efficient patent management (“The Patenting Paradox“) . Gasnier’s study shows that despite a dramatic increase in the number of patents filed each year, the majority of those patents are not actively used. This behavior is called the “Patenting Paradox”. Why does it exist? What are its effects? How can this paradox be solved? This study addresses these issues. It provides models to better understand...