Posts Tagged: "SMEs"

As Knowledge Ecology International and its allies await the decision of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on their latest attempt to misuse the Bayh-Dole Act for the government to set prices on any product based on a federally funded invention, they’re growing more uneasy. And that’s understandable. If you’d bet the house on an ivory tower theory that’s been summarily rejected for the past 18 years every time it’s been trotted out, you’d be uneasy too. They know that if the Biden Administration rejects the pending petition to march in on the prostate cancer drug Xtandi because of its cost, this leaky vessel can’t be credibly refloated again.

In response to intense lobbying for patent litigation reform, Congress was convinced that a substantial amount of district court patent litigation involved “poor quality” patents that were clearly invalid. Images of extortionist patent trolls were widely portrayed as a primary threat to U.S. innovation. The high cost of patent litigation, years to reach a judicial resolution and reliance on lay juries to determine highly technical issues were cited as evidence of a broken system. In response, Congress passed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) in 2011…. The current IPR system as implemented has caused severe damage to an important segment of our innovation community. Congress instructed the USPTO Director, in 35 USC§ 316(b), to “consider the effect of any such regulation on the economy, the integrity of the patent system, the efficient administration of the Office, and the ability of the Office to timely complete proceedings instituted under this chapter.” It is time for the Director to reevaluate the effect of IPRs.

“Property rights are not just good for the economy, they save lives”, Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform said, speaking at Innovating the Future: Celebrating 2021 World IP Day, sponsored by the Property Rights Alliance. Norquist would go on to conclude his brief opening remarks by lamenting, “the damage that would be done if some of the critics of intellectual property have their way.” Norquist was implicitly referring to an IP waiver proposal by South Africa and India, which would allow nations to ignore patent rights relating to COVID-19 related innovations, particularly vaccines. This waiver of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is a truly bad idea, and one addressed head on by Andrei Iancu, senior adviser to the Renewing America Innovation Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

World IP Day may not have fully captured the public imagination yet, but it is increasingly an important moment to reflect on a topic that impacts all of our lives in more ways than are widely recognized. In Ireland for example, like many other modern open economies, IP plays a significant role in how we participate in the global marketplace. In addition, it is the intrinsic intangible nature of IP that allows us to play a role that is many times greater than our relative size would seem to allow. For example, in 2019, the European Patent Office (EPO) and European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) jointly published a report on “Intellectual property rights intensive industries and economic performance in the European Union”. According to that report, IP rights (IPR) intensive industries account for 45% of GDP, on average, across the EU. In Ireland, however, the share attributed these industries was 65% of GDP—a good 20 points ahead of the next highest.

Discussion around intellectual property strategies for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often focus chiefly on patent and trademarks. But the benefits of copyright to a small business should not be underestimated. Copyrights protect the expression of ideas in works that are tangible. Copyrightable subject matter is very broad—all “original works of authorship, fixed in a tangible medium” are protected immediately from creation. The U.S. Copyright Office lists these categories as subject to copyright protection: literary works, musical works, performing arts, visual arts, other digital content (including computer software code), motion pictures, photographs, sound recordings, and architectural works. 17 U.S.C. Section 102.

Today is World Intellectual Property Day; the theme for the 21st annual celebration raising awareness for the role of various forms of IP in supporting strong economies is “IP & SMEs: Taking Your Ideas to Market.” Events all over the world are planned for this week to highlight the crucial role that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play in commercializing intellectual properties, using the protections afforded by IP to translate engineered improvements and creative expression from the minds of inventors into marketable products that are commercialized so the whole world can benefit and enjoy.

The movements of IP-centric business have never been easy to appreciate. With technology patent and licensing values slowly returning to higher levels, it is a good time to revisit a business model which has been a lightning rod for criticism: the public intellectual property company or PIPCO. PIPCO is a term coined by this Intangible Investor columnist in 2013, when there were 30 or more publicly held patent licensing companies with a collective market capitalization of about $9 billion. That may sound like a lot to some, but when you look at the largest patent licensing company, Qualcomm, whose market cap is currently $136 billion, you realize almost everyone else in this group is or was relatively small, typically a micro-cap, with a market value under $1 billion. These companies’ lack of size, unpredictable quarterly revenue and attractive but unpredictable assets positioned them below the radar of most institutional investors. When it comes to weathering financial storms, like ocean-going vessels, sizes matters.

The latest in a series of reports by the European Patent Office (EPO) and European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) studying IP-intensive industries and their contribution to economic performance and employment in the European Union has found that companies owning at least one patent, registered design or trademark generate higher revenues per employee than companies that do not own IP rights and pay higher wages on average than other companies. The EPO-EUIPO report is titled “Intellectual property rights and firm performance in the European Union” and builds on research conducted in 2013, 2016 and 2019 regarding the contribution of IP-intensive companies to the EU economy, as well as a 2015 EUIPO study based on data from 12 Member States. The latest report analyzes over 127,000 European firms and compares the economic performance of firms that own IPRs with those that do not.

“IP matters for the European economy,” said Yann Ménière, the chief economist for the European Patent Office (EPO), who provided the opening keynote presentation at the EPO’s High-growth technology business conference 2019 on November 4 in Dublin, Ireland at Aviva Stadium. Leading off a packed two-day program, Ménière released the results of an EPO study on how Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) used intellectual property rights, specifically patents. SMEs typically file European patents for high-potential inventions that find their way to market, the EPO study finds. Therefore, not surprisingly, the EPO report also shows that SMEs that rely on patents have an above average number of employees, and those employees are higher paid and contribute more to European GDP.