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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, December 07, 2007

Is this what patents are for?

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I have just come back from the IP07 Conference, and in the course of that, attended one of the most depressing presentations I have heard in a long time. The topic was Patent Licensing: why, you might ask, would that be depressing?
You might assume that patent licensing means something along the lines of; you invent some device or technology, secure a patent on it, then license it to someone else to develop, turn in to a product and then market - they make money, you are rewarded for your ingenuity, everyone is happy. Right?
You might assume that, but only if you are as naïve as I was on the topic. No: patent portfolio licensing in this sense means something rather different. Let’s suppose that, as a corporation you have acquired a library of patents over the years, which you may or may not presently be exploiting. Firstly you ‘mine’ those patents to identify any ideas that might be useful in step two, which is; you trawl the market trying to spot any product that might use a principle similar to one that figures in one of your patents. It doesn’t matter if that device or principle was developed completely independently of the process that led to your patent – if you find someone that fits the profile, you set the dogs on them. Or, in this case, the lawyers. You invite them to pay you lots of cash on the basis that their product ‘uses’ your patented IP – and if they decline you sue them for infringement. Or, as is quite likely, if they have their own patent on the subject, you await the counter-claim and dig in for a long war of attrition.
I can’t think of anything more likely to stifle innovation and the kind of mutual – if limited – disclosure of technological achievement that keeps the industry moving forward at a healthy pace. This licensing exercise is, for the most part, a big-corporation pastime: they are likely to have the patent portfolios to back such an exercise. And the deep pockets. If you are the little guy and you see a big company, and its legal advisers, coming after you, you might just pay up to make them go away – whatever the merits of their claim.
Not surprisingly, this seems to originate largely from the US. Not that that matters, because the US courts increasingly seem to regard the whole world as being in their jurisdiction. (The more so if you are a UK citizen, ever since that nice Mr. Blair signed a deal whereby, if the US courts want you , the UK government will hand you over without requiring any evidence – but that’s another matter.)
You might conclude that the whole concept is a scam perpetrated on technology-based industries by lawyers in order to keep them supplied with a steady income – it looks that way to me. The barbarians are at the gates, truly.

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