I never met an inventor who didn’t want to know the value of his inventions. Accounting rules allow intangible assets to be recorded on balance sheets at their ‘highest and best uses’. The highest and best use of inventions is typically to license the invention to a company capable of delivering products that incorporate the invention to the market. Licensing typically yields a higher value than using related patents to ensure freedom of operation, blocking competitors, or removing a technology from the market in order...

The Nokia vs. Apple patent dispute entered a new stage. Nokia recently brought up a fresh patent infringement action against Apple, alleging that Apple’s new iPad product infringes five Nokia patents. At a first glance, the recent lawsuit before the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin could be seen as nothing special. A patent holder just asserts his patents  against an alleged technology “theft”. But it looks as if there is more behind all this. We remember the first act of the dispute...

Negotiations about a new EU-South Korean Free Trade Agreement have taken a while, but finally parties reached an agreement. Although ambitious, nothing shocking it seems, but as soon words like “intellectual property” and “computer programs” are used in the same context – in this case what is known as “Chapter 10″ of the Trade Agreement, this is like waving a red flag to a bull. The agreement is not all that exciting to read and many provisions are merely confirmations on already existing...

2010 fast approaching it’s a good time to reflect on the past year and come with some good intentions for the New Year. Almost a decade ago we were hyped by fear of a Millennium Bug as a potential apocalypse of the Internet and IT systems. Google was still in its infancy and the social media technologies were in an embryonic state compared to today’s ubiquitous facebooking, twittering and blogging. In the ten years that have passed the technological and communications landscape have changed with 350 million users[1] worldwide...

Over the years patent build up could go without repercussions for the patent “market”. Let us say the market for supply and demand for patent rights. Initially, during the 1980s and early 1990s this was because Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean companies took licenses from European and US patent owners. Then the Korean powerhouses came up, well  placed to take over the consumer electronics market but low on IP.  Taiwan had its own policy but was not afraid of buying strategically, be it a lot less then Korean companies. ...

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...

The movie Flash Of Genius (2008), the story of Robert Kearns, who owned a chain of auto-part stores and invented the intermittent windshield wiper and made his life story of suing Detroit carmakers over patent infringement, did not make it to European film houses. It did not even got attention in Europe as far as we can see. The movie is one of those rare occasions when Hollywood and intellectual property meet. It shows us historic tales of great inventors who did not get an easy income under their invention. In that respect...

Sadly, the IP community has for long failed to go out telling the non-IP world – not least the top management of companies and governments alike – in simple, understandable terms what crucial role IP plays and how underestimated its potential in international trade and economic growth is. And how we must change this. Here is an example. Technology development and technology transfer between the “have’s” and the “have-not’s” are key in obtaining global economic growth in …

When reading this month’s issue of IAM magazine (nr. 34), we came across a remark allegedly made by a senior IP executive at a major high-tech company, (“The patent transaction market at a crossroads“) asking himself “how can you justify buying patents when you are laying people off” .  A rather amazing statement from the mouth of someone who should know better. Two issues are being put in the equation here that really have little to do with each other. In recession times, when demand is low, companies...

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....

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Nov. 6 the first of a possible series of public hearings to explore the evolving market for intellectual property (IP). The hearings will be held beginning on December 5, 2008, in Washington, DC. The FTC will examine changes in IP law, patent-related business models, and new learning about the operation of the IP marketplace since the issuance in October 2003 of the Commission report To Promote Innovation: The Proper Balance of Competition and Patent Law and Policy. A great initiative...

While economic news gets worse, and most of Europe heading for recession or already in it, IP practitioners may wonder what effect those dim outlooks have on their IP practice. Attorneys, like whatever economic season we are in, will flourish as usual, be it that the bankers and M&A gurus may have lesser times. An almost standard policy to a weak economy in an IP dense area like electronics, semicon and telcom is for market players to increase litigation over market share by using their patent portfolio. So litigators will...

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.” …

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. …

Increasingly, big oil companies use their Intellectual Property to achieve competitive advantage over their state-owned rivals (NOC’s). Why is that so? More than 80% of the world’s oil reserves are in the hands of state-controlled companies. Big Oil is loosing its grip on those energy rich countries and their NOCs. NOCs learned over the years how to handle their natural reserves themselves, using service companies like Schlumberger and Grifco. Rob Cox and Cyrus Sanati suggested three options for the industry to counter this...

It can be no coincidence that both in the US as well as in Europe “patent exhaustion” has been brought in the legal limelight. Last week in the US the US Supreme Court allowed certiorari in a case Quanta Computer Inc. v. LG Electronics Inc., 06-937.At the same time in Europe Nokia alleges in German (Mannheim) and Dutch (The Hague) courts that Qualcomm’s patent(s) are “exhausted” in respect of chipsets supplied by Texas Instruments which have been sold on the European Union market with a Qualcomm license. If Nokia’s...

Tony Fish of AMF Ventures commented in his blog on Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, who spoke about “mobile, mobile, mobile” as the next opportunity at the O’Reilly Web2Expo in San Francisco last month. It’s funny – you could pretty easily find the same types of things said about Web 1.0 during Bubble 1.0. For example, this is what the book Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities by two McKinsey guys in 1997 was about. Another book that discussed all this was Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0 from the same...

When the first patent auction by Ocean Tomo was held in San Francisco, it caused a huge media hype in the US. It looks that the next one, in London on June 1, will receive the same attention from European media (if by then, we do not have an overdose of hype already because of the Michael Jackson auction on Wednesday and Thursday). The reason it will is, no doubt, because of the esoteric nature of the goods being auctioned. We can imagine old cars, antique books, art, wines and other “tangible” goods being sold on an auction....

Was the first IP auction in Munich, yesterday at Kempinski hotel, a success? Well, it depends how you define “success”. Certainly the German organizers, Intellectual Property Auctions GmbH (IPA) did a great job. You must be courageous to organize an auction in Europe, where the notion of selling and buying patents is still in its infancy and general IP awareness is at minimal levels. So yes, it was a success in the sense that IPA has been the first one to create greater awareness that patents are more than rights you acquire...

If a newly identified work of Vincent van Gogh would be auctioned, would it be noticed by the bloggers, the press, any attention at all? Probably only when a new record is being set by the auctioned price. No the picture for this blog does not represent the proceeds of one of the patents auctioned today in Munich. The auction is organized by IP Auctions GmbH, a German IP valuation group. It is very much modeled after the Ocean Tomo auction, held in San Francisco, Chicago and New York. It was announced that next to patents, also...