Posts Tagged: "intellectual property insurance"

Recent Changes in Insurance Policy Forms Leaving Companies Exposed to Risk of Copyright Claims

There has been a recent trend by insurance companies to change their policy forms and use language that provides substantially less coverage for these kinds of claims. Buyers of insurance might still see that the policies they’re buying have “Advertising Injury” coverage that includes “copyright” claims. Nevertheless, these subtle changes to the actual language in the forms (which few policyholders ever actually read before buying their policy) eliminate most, if not all, of the benefits of the coverage. Careful companies buying insurance and concerned about the risk of copyright infringement lawsuits need to watch out for these two changes that could leave them exposed to costly lawsuits.

Proactively Defending Against Patent Lawsuits

By keeping an eye on stealth and dangerous patents managing the future risk presented is much easier. By proactively monitoring the landscape of published applications and granted patents you may be able to engage in design work-arounds to avoid the most dangerous patents. You may also be able to actively identify patents and pending patent application that are ripe for licensing or acquisition at an early stage, perhaps before the patent even issues or before the patent works its way into the hands of a litigious patent owner. Even if you cannot acquire rights through licensing or acquire all dangerous patents, if you have a meaningful patent footprint that gives you the right to do a variety of things you may well be able to defend based upon having broad based rights to engage in what it is that you are accused of doing.

Landscape 2013: Who are the Players in the IP Marketplace?

The latest statistics show that the cumulative value of U.S. intellectual property is approximately $5.8 trillion (or 48.4% of GDP), and each year over half a million patent applications are filed, over a quarter million patents are issued, over 4000 patent infringement suits are filed and IP verdicts total over $4.6 billion with a median patent damage award of approximately $4 million. Against this backdrop, I now present an updated taxonomy containing 19 IP-related business models. The business models are in addition to the “traditional” operating companies and their “traditional” IP law firms. Further, while not pretending to be all-inclusive, a directory of players implementing one or more of these 19 IP business models is available for download at the end of this post.

Is Your Patent Portfolio Safe from the Supreme Court?

The Prometheus decision shows that you can never know for sure what the outcome will be once you arrive at the Supreme Court. We also know that the Supreme Court is taking more patent cases now than ever, and those decisions have significant implications for the entire industry above and beyond the patent claims at issue and the parties involved. Your patent portfolio may be at risk because some other company obtained poorly written claims and the Supreme Court has taken the opportunity to decide not only the issues before them but to make decisions based on overarching concerns about the entire patent system.

Tenth Circuit Finds Patent Infringement Insurance Coverage Under “Advertising Injury” Clause

Therefore, no one should read this decision as stating a general rule that patent infringement is covered under “advertising injury” provisions in a typical insurance contract. Rather, the decision should be read as saying that it is possible, based on these peculiar facts, that coverage could exists for this particular patent infringement claim under the advertising injury provisions. Essentially, reaching this determination on summary judgment without full consideration was deemed inappropriate.