Posts Tagged: "ip"

We have a new edition to our annual article series, which looking backward with reflections on the biggest moments of the year that has passed and which offers wishes for the year ahead. This year we also asked industry leaders if they would care to take a stab at predicting the future. Of course, if I’m going to ask others…

In the last 35 years, there has been a shift from a labor economy to a knowledge economy. Consequently, intangible assets (and thus, IP rights) have emerged as the most powerful asset class, overtaking more traditional capital assets such as real property, plant and equipment. Multiple studies have shown that a majority of the value of a U.S. publicly-traded company comes from intangible assets. In fact, one study has even placed the value of U.S. corporations included in the S&P 500 Index as coming 80% from intangibles.

The IP Law Summit will be held from September 14, 2014, through September 16, 2014, at the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, Palm Beach, Florida. The event will bring together senior IP Counsel from large corporations and mid-market organizations with service providers. The Summit is an invitation-only event that will take place behind closed doors.

Stealing originally created content is extremely problematic, whether it is a blog article, a newspaper article, a book, painting, photograph or movie. If you search the Internet for practically anything you will be inundated with the same text over and over without really finding useful answers. Of course, the websites that engage in widespread plagiarism, which is just a less judgmental way to say “widespread copyright infringement,” are reaping the economic rewards of their stealing while making it increasingly difficult for those who actually create original content to survive. The infringer business model is frequently to simply copy from others who don’t have the means or ability to seek redress, and Congress is held hostage by protesters who don’t want to have to pay for free original content.

The IP Law Summit will be held from September 14, 2014, through September 16, 2014, at the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, Palm Beach, Florida. The event will bring together senior IP Counsel from large corporations and mid-market organizations with service providers. The Summit is an invitation-only event that will take place behind closed doors.

“Without a strong healthy business nothing else really matters–not even IP. A successful IP [plan] is one that follows the business and strategizes to meet its goals,” says Cynthia Raposo, Senior Vice President of Underarmour. The questions that need to be answered that go into formulating an intellectual property strategy–like when the company wants a profit, whether it is interested in attracting investors or academic collaborations or buyers, whether it will become a public or global company, what its niche in the market is, how fast developments in the field are– can’t be fully answered without not only consulting the business people, but being on the exact same page as them.

GROSSMAN: “A report released by the Global Intellectual Property Center found that IP-intensive industries employ 55.7 million Americans across dozens of sectors of the economy. In every state of this nation, millions of jobs hinge on the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights and supply wages 30% higher than non IP jobs. I think that increasingly reports such as these, will demonstrate, with hard facts and figures, to public policymakers the importance of intellectual property rights in promoting creativity and innovation in the U.S. economy, and thereby counter the popular and trendy notion that consumers should get everything they want instantaneously and for free.”

GROSSMAN: “I think that we will see some form of patent litigation reform passed by the Senate and then ultimately by Congress. Currently, there are very few things on which the Republicans and the Democrats can come together. However, patents and other types of intellectual property seem to be one area in which joint action is possible. I think that ultimately both parties are going to want to do something that shows that they can work together and get something important accomplished. Enacting the appropriate type of patent litigation reform would foster innovation and create jobs and thereby demonstrate to the American people that they still have a functioning Congress. The House has already passed a bill, and the President urged Congress to pass a bill in his State of the Union address. I think the momentum is there.”

Entering into a corporate transaction without a careful review of the intellectual property (IP) involved can have negative consequences on an enterprise’s future IP strategy. This is especially true when IP owners do not adequately supervise the corporate attorneys who are preparing the “customary” documents for a merger, acquisition, joint venture formation, equity investment, bridge loan or any other type…

I prophesy that the best we can hope for is a Bilski-esque vague instruction (wherein our top court opined that some business methods are patentable, citing the machine or transformation test as one viable test, without pointing to other valid tests and without enlightening the confused public.) The Court is once again likely to limit software patentability in some arcane way that harms job creation and stifles economic growth. The bright side is that the Court’s failure to protect our largest growth industries may help spur the legislative branch into further action. A decade of intermittent patent reforms has created a permanent cadre of patent lobbyists very willing to focus their considerable efforts and talents on a new patent issue. It would be advantageous to the patent system if that attention were productively channeled to specifically include our emerging technologies in our patent statutes, and to legislate patent eligibility in a manner that treats 101 as the broad filter it was intended to be, while employing the other patent statutes, such as 112 and 103, to correctly provide the narrower filters.

According to the FTC’s complaint, the elimination of future competition between Nielsen and Arbitron would likely cause advertisers, ad agencies, and programmers to pay more for national syndicated cross-platform audience measurement services. Thus, Nielsen agreed that it will divest and license assets and intellectual property needed to develop national syndicated cross-platform audience measurement services.

Critics argue that pharmaceutical patents are a barrier to wide-reaching access to medicines, especially for vulnerable populations in the developing world. They cast their argument in the phrase, “Patents Kill” and advocate against intellectual property (IP) protection for medical innovation and the trade agreements that incorporate them… Not surprisingly, barriers to access are more prevalent in less developed nations and access to medicine is a function of the level of economic development. Not surprisingly, higher-income nations benefit from greater access to medicines.

Two weeks ago House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (VA-6) announced the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican subcommittee assignments for the 113th Congress. See Republicans of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Today we meet the Democrats on the Subcommittee. It is the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet that has primary jurisdiction over matters relating to intellectual property matters. Thus, the House Subcommittee on IP that will be one of the primary focal points for any new legislation that deals with intellectual property over the next two years.