The Crossroads of Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks, Technology, and Business

Congratulations! You’ve filed your patent application. The next step is for the inventor to commercialize the newly created intellectual property. The three primary options are to completely assign the patent rights to another party, license the patent rights, or to manufacture, market, and sell the product disclosed in the patent application. Frequently, inventors wish to maintain some level of rights in the invention and do not wish to manufacture, market, and sell the product or process described in the patent application. For this reason, inventors often choose to license their technology. While the inventor is creating a list of potential licensees and creating a marketing plan for those potential licensees, he or she should also start thinking about the terms of a patent license. There are many options to think about for a patent license but three key terms include:

1. Payments – The most well known approach for payments are royalties. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of net sales, but there are also other methods of compensation. For example, the royalty may be a fixed amount for the term of the license, a fixed amount per year,  or a fixed amount per unit sold. The royalty rate varies and is influenced by factors such as:

• The industry of the product
• Whether the technology is a complete self-contained product or an improvement to an existing product
• Whether the technology is patent pending or the patent has issued
• Current market penetration of the product
• The number and nature of competing products

2. Termination – What causes the license to come to an end?

• Time – The license may be for a fixed term.
• Time Period – For example, as long as the patent is enforceable.
• Ongoing Performance Metrics – Minimum annual net sales, minimum annual royalties, minimum unit sales
• Milestones – Where the product is a pharmaceutical, the license may be valid for a certain period after FDA approval

3. Geography – The licensor may wish to grant  licenses on a country by country basis (or other regional divisions).

4. Field of Use – Field of use licensing permits the technology owner to divide license rights among various market segments. For example, the licensor of a chemical patent may grant an exclusive license to one party for use in the field of human medicine and a second exclusive license to a second party for use in the field of veterinary medicine.

Bonus – Other valuable assets may be licensed in addition to the patent or patent application. Commonly, proprietary information, trade secrets, know-how, or trademarks may be licensed in addition to the patent rights. For example, a patent application may disclose the best manner of making a composition that was known at the time it was filed. Later, the chemists might have determined a more cost-effective method or environmentally friendly of synthesizing the composition. Software patent applications might have related source code. That other valuable proprietary information may be part of the technology transfer.

There are many other terms to consider, but the above terms should be helpful in the early stages  of planning for terms in a patent license.

Some companies simply copy and paste the terms of service and privacy policies. This can be a costly mistake. The terms of service (“TOS”) and privacy policies (“PP”) should reflect the combination of legal, business, marketing, and ethical concerns of the company. Facebook has received a lot of criticism of its privacy policies over the years, ranging from the tracking beacon to the more recent outcry over granting Facebook application developers access to its user’s telephone number and address information. Even though Facebook’s action were likely permissible within its TOS and PP, the public outcry lead to a reversal of its policy, highlighting the extra-legal importance of the documents. [Edit: Facebook has resumed the policy.]

Legal
Part of the lack of attention to the TOS and PP is that they are, in fact, legal documents… so the website developers’ eyes glaze over reading the legalese (snooze). But because they are legal documents that can bind the company and the website visitor, proper attention should be paid to the documents. In hurriedly copying the documents from elsewhere, a meaningful TOS and PP for an opinion blog, a product website, an adult services website, a B2B cloud service, a server penetration business, etc. may not be implemented. Each type of business has its unique legal issues that should be addressed. All the terms from one set of documents may not be intended, useful, and/or enforceable in different business use cases.

Business
As a binding document, the TOS and PP can positively and negatively affect the direction of the business, including the monetization strategy. Facebook started with its users segmented in different silos, namely their schools. Originally, one needed a .edu email address in order to join and communication was generally limited to other people having emails with the same domain name. More recently, Facebook’s growth strategy is almost the opposite of that original strategy. It now encourages everyone to join and create relationships that did not previously exist. An inflexible TOS and PP may not have permitted that strategic change in direction.

Contrast that business scenario with the PP policy of the former eToys.com website. It read in part:

eToys respects your privacy. We do not sell, rent, loan or transfer any personal information regarding our customers or their kids to any unrelated third parties. Any information you give us about yourself or your kids is held with the utmost care and security and will not be used in ways to which you have not consented.

At a quick glance, that seems a respectable policy. However, the company went bankrupt. As the customer data was one of the valuable remaining assets in the bankruptcy estate, there was a dispute over the sale of the eToy.com customer list. In other words, the documents affected the ability of investors, creditors, and successors to recover value.

The potential reach of the documents as a whole (as well as the language of the above section) is further highlighted by the recent purchase of the free to use OkCupid.com dating website by the paid use Match.com website. If OkCupid had a privacy policy of similar to that of the above quoted eToy privacy policy, there may be questions whether Match.com is an “unrelated third party,” impacting any possible integration plans. In addition to the legal question, there would be a business valuation question for OkCupid and Match if OkCupid had been marketed with a strong privacy expection. OkCupid users may then leave in droves, decreasing the potential value of OKCupid to Match.com.

Marketing
It may seem counterintuitive, but the TOS and PP can support (or detract from) your marketing efforts. Currently, the industry trend is to move to the cloud. However, two key reasons why businesses are hesitant to move to the cloud are downtime and data access/use concerns. A cloud service provider of B2B applications where users enter valuable, sensitive business data has a more compelling message when it can state that the privacy policy explicitly states that business data will only be used for the purpose of the application and will not be processed individually or in the aggregate for marketing purposes.

Ethics
Again, it may seem counterintuitive that the TOS and PP dating can indicate the culture of a company, but podcast and technology guru Leo Laporte deactivated his Facebook account citing poor privacy control for a user account and stating that Facebook had incentive to not provide strong privacy (Note: he has since recreated a Facebook account). Yours truly only maintains test accounts on Facebook for similar reasons. In fact, Facebook’s privacy issues lead to startup Diaspora’s raising of ~ $200,000 based on creating a privacy oriented distributed social network. (Edit: And that little project called Google+)

A more pointed illustration of lack of ethics illustrated via the TOS and PP was shown in some now defunct dating websites. Those websites would send messages to male subscribers of the website that appeared to be from interested women. A few jilted men suspected that the messages weren’t from interested women and complained to the website operators suspecting that it was a ruse to entice them to sustain their subscriptions. The website “customer service” pointed those men to the terms of service, which stated that messages may be sent through the system from “likenesses” (read non-existent women) based on those men’s profiles and interests…. Those “unique” terms may be enforceable, but they are still ethically questionable. You can imagine that reputation of the company.

Conclusion
The above illustrations aren’t to endorse one approach over another but they should highlight that even though the terms of service and privacy policy are “contracts,” they should drafted to reflect the legal, business, marketing, and ethical goals of your company. Are your TOS and PP  Google’s Terms, StartPage’s Policy, Twitter’s Terms, or your own terms?

Frequently inventors consider licensing or sale of their patent application or issued patent as the means for monetizing their intellectual property. One challenging step is to determine who might be interested in licensing or purchasing the patent rights. Determining potential licensees or assignees is a key step in developing the business plan.

1. Search Engines

This is probably no surprise, but the search strategy needs to differ from the typical internet search. The goal is to locate websites of companies that have licensed patents, news releases announcing licensing of patents, industry analyses of patent transfers, and the like. Be prepared to view more than just the first page of results.

• Vary your search terms – You can start with a narrow search based on the features of the patent. For a fishing lure, the first search might be “patent license floating plastic fishing lure bass”. You can then alter the search to include different features and/or broaden the terms of your search to locate different results. Based on the above search, the next searches might be “patent pending clear plastic fishing lure” or “patented top fishing lures”.
• Vary your search sources – Remember that a lot of the discussion of patent licensing and intellectual property sales is not on the general web. The discussion of companies’ licensing and technology transfers may be part of an article in a business journal. Instead of searching just the “web” option of the search engine, search other segments such as “news”, “finance”, or “directories”.
• Vary your search engine – Even though Google is the preferred search engine for general use, other search engines can aid your search for licensees and assignees. There are industry specific search engines, thus you may look for an automotive electronics focused search engine if the patent application is in that industry (if it makes you feel better, you can search Google for the other search engines). Also there are search engines which group or “cluster” results. Thus a search with terms similar to the above fishing lure on a clustering search engine such as Yippy may present results categorized by “Business”, “Suppliers, Manufacturers”, or other relevant groups.

2. Trade shows

Trade shows are where a lot of suppliers and purchasers come together to buy, sell, introduce, and negotiate new technologies. Vendors, purchasers, sponsors, and suppliers listed on the trade show website may also be interested in acquiring rights to other technologies in the trade.

3. Thomasnet

ThomasNet is a comprehensive listing of more than 600,000 manufacturers, distributors, and services providers in more than 67,000 categories ranging from automotive equipment to chemical coatings. Some business in the relevant industries may actively acquire new technology.

4. United States Patent & Trademark Office

The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) website lists owners of patents and patent applications. One can search the patents records or search the patent assignments to look for owners of patent rights in the selected technologies. Owners of patent rights in the fields related to the patent may be interested in acquiring rights in related technologies from third parties.

Of course locating prospective licensees or assignees is only an early step in patent licensing or assignment. The inventor should still further research and qualify the company before proceeding. And the inventor should understand the value of a license or assignment of the invention the other party.

Licensing is one method of commercializing copyrighted material. A license is an agreement which permits another (“the licensee”) to use the intellectual property of the owner (“the licensor”) in a certain manner, typically to sell products based on the intellectual property. A license can be a lengthy document with many options to negotiate, but three key terms will be discussed in this post:

1. The Grant – What is being licensed?

The first step is decide what is being licensed. This may not be as simple a questions as it seems. Take the scenario where a “song” is being licensed. The valuable components of a song might include music, lyrics, artwork, video, and the name of the band. If a licensee only seeks to “sample” the song, the license may only grant rights to use a derivative of the music.  If the song is being used in a commercial, the license may only grant rights to the chorus of the music and lyrics. In a complex software system with multiple APIs and interfaces, perhaps a license might grant rights in a single interface.

2. Terms of Payment – Who, What, When, How?

The terms of payment should vary with the situation. The most commonly discussed approach is royalties, where the amount remitted to the licensor is based on sales of a product based on the licensed material. This may make sense where the subject of the copyrighted subject matter is simply being resold, such as the song of an artist. Even then further details need to be addressed, such as the frequency of payment and allowance for returns.

A royalty may not be appropriate for some situations. If the license involves use of part of a song in advertising, a royalty . Perhaps the terms of payment require the licensee to pay the licensor based on the number of times the advertisement is broadcast.

3. The term of the license – When does it end?

Many a content author has been disappointed by failure to consider this term. Those authors have entered in an exclusive license with a perpetual term and were unable to pursue alternate means to monetize their intellectual property when no sales (and thus no royalties) were being generated. For this reason, a licensor may use alternate approach to terminate the license. Perhaps the license may be for a certain time period or if net sales drop below a threshhold amount for a certain period of time, the license is terminated.

There are many other terms to negotiate, such as the scope of use, territory of use, warranties, and choice of law. However, these three terms are an excellent starting point for discussion between a potential licensor and licensee.

I know that you have heard it a million times, but I have to say it once more: Write it down! Entity agreements (of which a portion may include intellectual property issues) for the startup should be written down.  By now, you’ve read about the Crunchpad lawsuit, where its looks like the Crunchpad is no more and one of the founders is seeking to create a similar product (the JooJoo) in a new startup. The lawsuit did not mention a signed agreement and it is unclear what each party’s rights are in the involved intellectual property. Some background information can be found in the below links:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/crunchpad-end/

http://mixergy.com/joojoo-crunchpad-chandrasekar-rathakrishnan/

Unfortunately, startups come and go all the time. Fortunately, new potentially successful startups can rise from the pieces of a failed startup. Some of the desirable leftover assets include the  people and the intellectual property.  However, there will be questions on both. What happens with the people and the IP on failure? Are the departing people immediately free to work in the same space as the failed startup? Who has what  rights in the IP?

These issues should be addressed at formation of the startup, not when a failure or dispute occurs. Having the deal documented makes it easier to start making products and minimizes litigation potential and scope in the case of a failed business. Some issues relevant to this dispute often addressed in an intellectual property agreement include:

• What intellectual property is being contributed to the startup? This should be a detailed description, not just a general intellectual property transfer. It appears that the Crunchpad included hardware, operating system, and application components. Did all of those exist and were they transferred to the startup?

• What happens to rights on IP derived from the contributed IP? There were some reports that a Crunchpad prototype was the contribution to the startup? Assuming those reports are accurate, who has rights in the IP derived from the prototype. It is possible that the hardware, operating, system, and/or application components were further developed during the operation of the startup. Who has rights in those improvements?

• What happens to the IP upon the failure of the new formed business or departure of its contributor? Does the IP remain with the startup? Do all rights revert to the contributor? Does the startup retain any rights?

Answering those and other questions at formation can minimize later problems with the intellectual property of a failed business. Failure to address the questions could lead to questions of ownership, unwilling investors,  and product (read: income) delays.