Intellectual property licensing

Intellectual property licensing

Intellectual property licensing agreement is a partnership between intellectual property rights owner (licensor) and another who is authorized to use such rights (license) in exchange for an agreed payment with terms and condition. Then the licensee has the rights for the respective Intellectual Property assets for a period of time given by the licensor.

License is the certificate that proves one has been granted authority to do something under governmental license. Licensees' mean who has the license to market the product without the infringement fear of the licensor. Licensor means a person who gives another a license, particularly a private party doing so, such as a business giving someone a license to sell its product. A variety of Intellectual property licensing agreement which is classified broadly, it includes technology licensing agreement, trademark licensing agreement, and copyright licensing agreement etc. 

An Intellectual Property asset includes patents, trademark, copyright, Industrial Design, Integrated Circuits and Geographical Indication. The license is limited to the territory level. When a license is given to India then it is applicable only for India and it won't allow licensor/licensee to sale or intellectual property assets protection is not applicable to the US.

Patent Intellectual Property licensing means where a license is given to the private/second/third party to use the patented invention with an agreement. The benefit of License is to increase the market level of the both licensee and licensors. In related to software EUCLA means end –user license agreement, which means the user, may install the software on a limited number of computers.

In patent law, Compulsory license is a license given by the central government to those interested person for working the patented inventions. At any time after the expiration of three years from the date of grant of patent, any interested person may make an application to the controller for the grant of compulsory license on patent due to the following reasons

• The reasonable requirements of the public with respect to the patent have not been satisfied.
• Patented invention has not been available at reasonable price.
• Patented invention has not been worked in the territory of India. 

If the interested applicant doesn't use the compulsory license properly for working the patented invention within two years, then the compulsory license is revoked and given to another interested person. 

Intellectual property Trademark licensing is an agreement/ grant given between licensor and licensee to distribute the products under a trademark. With the help of license, the licensee may use the trademark without fear of a claim of trademark infringement by a licensor.

Cross license agreement is a contract between two or more parties where each party grants right/license of intellectual property assets to other party. It means that not only licensor including licensee has the rights to grant license to third party.  Thus by cross licensing each party maintains their freedom to bring the commercial to product to market. For example a literary work and an anthology that includes that literary work may be cross licensed between two publishers. 

Intellectual property licensing is an effective tool for achieving business goals. It will be active within a period of intellectual property assets and after the expiration of time period then it can be used by the public without any fear/permission.

 

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW

Intellectual property law

           Intellectual property refers to any Intellectual creation of mind. Intellectual Property laws give people the right to own and profit from their artistic, scientific and technological creations for a designated period of time.

The Intellectual Property is divided in to tangible and intangible properties.  The intellectual properties, namely patents, copyright, Industrial design and trade secret are intangible/Movable properties. Personal properties like land, buildings are tangible / immovable properties. Inventors are granted to a variety of intangible assets, such as ideas, business methods, inventions, musical piece, literary work, artistic works, discoveries, words, phrases, symbols, and designs.

Again the Intellectual Property law may be divided into industrial property and literary property. The industrial property are patents, trademark, copyright, Industrial design, trade secret and layout design. The literary property may be classified as copyright and neighboring rights. The neighboring rights are performer's rights and broadcasting rights. The copyright covers artistic, musical, dramatic and literary works. 

Patent is a monopoly right given by the government to an inventor for a period of twenty years. Trademark is a unique sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization or other legal entity to identify  the products or services.

Copyright relates to original work of literary, artistic, dramatic or musical work, Cinematographic films, Sound Recording and Software program. A related right refers to the category of rights granted to performers, phonogram producers and broadcasters. A design refers to the features of shape, configuration, pattern, ornamentation or composition of lines or colors applied to any article. 

Geographical Indication is an indication which identifies goods as agricultural goods, natural goods or manufactured goods as originating, or manufactured in the territory of country, or a region or locality in that territory. Trade secret is any information that is not generally known, that will give a business advantage, or is commercially useful. 

Layout design means a layout of transistors and other circuitry elements and includes lead wires connecting such elements and expressed in any manner in semiconductor integrated circuit

The scope of Intellectual Property  Law is to protect others from copying or taking unfair advantage of the work or reputation of another and provides repay for their infringement. The protection is vital for industrial, commercial and economic development. The intellectual property can be assigned, mortgaged, and licensed. For intellectual property protection, it has to be registered with respective intellectual property office for limited duration. After the expiry of the period, it becomes public property and anybody is free to use it. The intellectual properties rights are private rights are private rights.

Intellectual property grants exclusive rights to intellectual creations. The exclusive rights allow owners of intellectual property to reap monopoly rights. These monopoly rights provide a financial incentive for the creation of Intellectual Property and pay associated research and development costs. 

The intellectual property law is territorial in operation. The primary objective of an Intellectual Property Law is to encourage inventions by promoting their protection and utilization so as to contribute to the development of Industries, which in turn contributes to the promotion of technological innovation and to the transfer and dissemination of technology. To protect the intellectual property law, various International conventions, treaties and agreement have been entered in to the countries.

 

 

 

Patent Licensing

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS | PATENT LICENSING     Intellectual Property Rights patent licensing raises as a host for critical legal and business issues for companies to ensure that the company has a right level of protections as it approaches the market place. The company should determine if it will obtain an exclusive right or a non-exclusive right.   Patent licensing is a waiver by the licensor of the right to exclude the licensee from practicing under the patent rights. Licensee would prefer to obtain an exclusive right. Even though there are disadvantages of a non exclusive license, a non exclusive license does not require any affirmative rights with respect to the enforcement of the licensed patent.   An exclusive patent licensing provides the licensee the promise that the licensor will not grant licenses to other parties. An exclusive license does not imply that the licensor has not granted any non exclusive licenses prior to the grant of exclusive license and the license agreement should mention that the licensor has not issued any prior licenses. An exclusive license does not grant the right to sublicense. This right must be separately granted.   To obtain an exclusive license, the licensee should agree to a minimum annual royalty provision. The licensee may wish to commercialize the patent rights in the first year of license or after a period of time. A minimum royalty is provided where if the royalty do not set a minimum amount after the agreed commercial period, the licensor may terminate the license agreement or the licensee mast pay the difference in the actual royalty amount. According to the license agreement, there are chances other than the termination of the patent right where the exclusive right of the patent may be converted to the non exclusive right if the licensee does not pay the minimum royalty amount.     In patent licensing, the licensor may also ensure that the exclusive licensee commercializes the patent rights by the 'Best Efforts' clause. The court may interpret this clause to avoid exploitation of the licensed patents. The licensee may rely upon the annual royalty provision to ensure commercialization efforts.   The exclusive license may be also limited to a field of use as a way to limit the licensor's risk of licensee non-exploitation. Here, the licensor can grant exclusive rights to different licensees in markets and application areas. Care must be taken in defining the field of use in these arrangements.   The patent licensing agreements should address the issue of improvements. Improvements are something which does the same function as the licensed invention in a better and cheaper way or modification of a part or process of the invention or something which is similar to the function of licensed patent.   The issue of royalties plays an important part in patent licensing. The licensee would like to know the cost in the commercialization effort, while the licensor wants to recover its patent costs and reap the rewards of the invention. Payment of royalties on the use of the licensed products that are not sold but otherwise disposed should be addressed in the agreement.

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Patent Search

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS | PATENT SEARCH   Intellectual property rights, patent search gives a very broad description. Patent search is a process by which prior inventions or ideas are examined with a goal to find information that bears close similarity to a given patent or proposed invention.   Patent search are of different kinds and it is hard to capture the essence of each type in a single description. The patent search may include documents searched in U.S. foreign patents, published patent applications, non-patent literature, product literature and scientific journals and databases.   Patent search should be done for various reasons, they are as follows:   v     An inventor would like to make sure his invention is unique before he spends time and money to obtain a patent. v     A company would like to produce a product, and even though they do not wish to patent the product they want to make sure that they do not get sued by someone else that might have already patented the idea. v     Patent search is made to make the valid search for any companies. v     Patent search is made for researchers who like to know the list of the most recent patents in a particular field which would help to guide his research.   There are two types of patent searches they are Quick Search Advance Search Quick search lists the most common search fields. Search can be done for a word or a simple phrase or patent number in any listed fields. Search in more than one field at a time can be done. Quick search also has additional features like word stemming, sort order and date range to further enhance your search.   Advance search is commonly used to create complex queries to search multiple fields using field abbreviations. Boolean operator, nesting and wildcards can be used in advance search. Word stemming, sort order and date range are also present to further enhance your search.   Patent search consist of the Boolean operator which helps to combine words or phrases to broaden or narrow the search. A Boolean operator can be used to specify what you want and what you do not want while searching.  Some of the Boolean operators are NOT, AND and OR.   The words that are to be searched can be enclosed within parentheses or brackets to specify the order in which they should be processed. Information within the parentheses is read first and then the information outside the parentheses. If there are more than two parentheses, the inner one is first read and then the next till the whole query is interpreted.   Proximity patent search helps you to specify how near/distant the search terms should be. You cab specify the distance or nearness of the terms searched as whole numbers.   Thus the patent search is most valid for researchers, companies, and scholars to know the broad description of the prior invention.

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