The Lure of Money

Licenses are a type of contract that details the terms of a bargain between involved parties. Corporations use licenses as a way of standardizing and memorializing terms and conditions between parties. This article focuses on two specific types of licenses—FRAND…
An NDA is a legal agreement between a company and a counter-party of that company to exchange information, for the purpose of a project, a licensing opportunity, marketing campaign, R&D or sourcing etc. Examples of information which can be protected…
An IP license in its simplest form is an agreement where an IP owner (the Licensor) permits another person (the Licensee) to engage in activities that, in the absence of the IP License Agreement, would infringe the Licensor’s legal rights…
On Tuesday February 2, 2016 IPEG Consultant Severin de Wit gave a Workshop for the Netherlands Association of Insolvency Attorneys (Insolad). The presentation for that workshop “Intellectuele Eigendom en Insolventie” is in Dutch and can be found here (for videos,…
The International Licensing Platform Vegetable Association (ILP) was founded on 13 November 2014 with the aim of improving the worldwide access to and use of plant traits. The platform applies exclusively to vegetable varieties. On the same day, the background…
You will never get the license agreement your technology deserves. You get the license agreement you negotiate. With this in mind, it is important for inventors, licensing professionals and intellectual property lawyers to constantly hone their negotiating skills. Here are…
After the EU Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation against Samsung a few weeks ago the dispute between the biggest stakeholders in the Telecommunication equipment market recently takes a new turn. The EU Commission has opened two further formal…
Patent risk managers would love to know which patents could eventually cause potential business disruption or could end up being licensed at high costs and which not. A number of prediction methods are currently used in patent risk management but…
The European Commission has been pretty quiet about antitrust and licensing issues surrounding standard essential patents since the Commission ended its investigations against Rambus and Qualcomm in 2009. Both Rambus and Qualcomm were accused by its competitors of violating European…
A senior licensing executive from a prestigious technology transfer office posed the following question to me: “Our TTO is not willing to grant an indemnification to our licensee. In view of this position, to what extent should we discount the…
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…
The recent European Commission decision on Rambus’ alleged antitrust behavior provides interesting insights in what royalty rates offered by Rambus can be regarded as “fair”, “reasonable” and “non-discriminatory”. The antitrust proceedings dealt with the licensing behavior of Rambus Inc. after…
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…
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…