Thursday, February 28, 2013 6:26 pm | By Christoph Elmiger
Patent pools offer licenses for technologies at a fair fee. This system seems like an effective solution until the patent begins to expire. That means the patents lose their power that brings the value, so the price should go down. But now some pools lock in licensors for long terms and the conditions don’t reflect the worth of the patents. For large corporations is it not a problem to pay these fees, but for small and medium sized startups they erect barriers.
Patent trolls against innovation and consumers 3/4
Monday, February 25, 2013 5:35 pm | By Christoph Elmiger
Patent trolls which start lawsuits mar the market,but these suits are not even shared on all patent classes. The study of James E. Bessen shows us that computer and communication patents account for seventy five percent of the lawsuits. In contrast, two percent of the suits involved chemical or drug patents. Software patents have been the major contributor to the recent explosion of lawsuits. With that in mind, what effect do these suits have on the market and, ultimately, the consumer? For starters, “Patent trolls have cost publicly traded defendants $500 billion since 1990.”
Patent trolls and the case of MobileMedia Ideas LLC 2/4
Friday, February 22, 2013 4:30 pm | By Christoph Elmiger
According to research by Colleen Chien, a professor of Law at the Santa Clara University, until December 1st 2012, more than 60 percent of all patent lawsuits were introduced by patent-assertion entities or companies whose business model is to assert patents. They behave in this way, rather than build and research their own technology. There trend has been increasing more than 15 percent in 2011 and 37 percent in comparison to five years ago.
