The Global Technology Impact Forum (GTIF), created by WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) and LESI (The Licensing Executive’s Society International), held their inaugural event in Geneva Switzerland this past January 2012.

At its most basic, a reasonable royalty analysis begins with one simple question: How much better off is the accused infringer for using the patented technology? Perhaps due to their directness in addressing that issue, the “analytical approach” and variant techniques have been attractive methods in reasonable royalty inquiries for some time.

This paper starts with briefly discussing the 25% rule and the argumentation for and against it. The paper continues with developing a new investment-based method for determining FRAND licensing royalties, a method not only applicable to one-to-one bilateral licensing deals but also to multilateral deals with multiple license sellers and multiple license buyers. The paper ends with discussing limitations and generalizations, opening up for further research.

The typical model followed by many TTOs (technology transfer offices), and, indeed, Floralis, sees the Technology Transfer Manager identify potential prospects interested in a license agreement, negotiate, and draw up agreements which will see revenues shared between the inventive source, developer and sometimes the technology transfer intermediary.

Valuation becomes an important issue as soon as it comes down to negotiating license terms. We need to know how much the licensed product is worth and how much we can ask or pay for it. In the licensing community several rules of thumb get applied to determine fair license terms. As an unavoidable consequence these rules of thumb generalize and simplify the actual situation and require adaptation in special cases. When using a rule of thumb for too long its original meaning gets blurred and it develops a life of its own. In this article we revisit the main principle of all business activities, value creation, and deduct a method to determine fair license terms for virtually every industry, free of out-of-date rules and prejudices.

One of the most eagerly awaited patent decisions of the last 12 months was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University v Roche Molecular Systems, Inc.1 Whilst starting as a patent infringement suit, the case was ultimately decided on other issues such as the priority of rights to an invention, where the inventor has purported to assign the same invention separately to different parties, and the assignment of future inventions. The underlying invention had been partly funded by a federal agency so the case was further complicated by issues concerning the scope of the U.S. Bayh-Dole Act and in particular its effect on who owns an invention, the development of which has been touched by even a dollar of federal funding.

This is Part I of a three part series on Russian patent law. It is a summary of Russian patent law prepared for use in business transactions dealing with intellectual property. It is not intended to be a legal reference for the subject. It is intended to provide a working knowledge of the patent system to ease concerns of businesses working with Russian companies. Part I provides a general overview; Part II discusses points of interest for business transactions dealing with patents; and Part III provides a helpful table of contents and discusses peculiarities in terminology which differ in Russian and English law.

We are entering a time when many organizations and individuals can be effective at participating in the innovation process. Innovation was used to keep people out, now it is used to invite people in. For this reason, WIPO recommends the development of collaborative networks for innovation through innovation platforms. The aim of these platforms is to identify and connect multiple actors with complementary resources in the search for creative and meaningful solutions that are mutually beneficial. As a result, such collaborative networks would involve a wide range of actors, including academia, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, the private sector and, of course, the individuals forming the network.

Whether you realize it or not, you are a practitioner of real options analysis.Real options analysis is an attempt to quantify the value of future, ancillary opportunities that derive from undertaking a given course of action. These opportunities may arise from serendipitous discovery of something of value. For instance, while setting out to discover a medicine for cardiovascular disease Pfizer serendipitously discovered Viagra. Another manifestation of real options value is that undertaking one activity will put you on a path that will provide you with an entrée to pursue a series of similar activities. For example, Apple’s development of the iPod provided a platform for the development of iPhones and iPads.

Developed and developing nations around the world have been concerned, for several decades, with technological innovation. Laws have been enacted in many countries to stimulate innovation within the academic environment and in the business world, and to build bridges between universities and private enterprises to bring such technical innovation to the market.

With commercial success come friends and enemies you didn’t know you had. But everything is relative. Success, failure, friends or enemies depend on who you are (industry, university, start-up) and on your business model. Dealing with software, commercial success comes with a product that contains (embedded) software or with software on a support (memory stick, CD-ROM) to be run on a device. For our purposes, and for reasons explained further, software and the device that runs the software will be assimilated, and considered as our product.