patent

Examples of patent in the following topics:

• Patents

  • There are three types of patents.
  • A U.S. patent currently lasts 20 years.
  • The value of a patent that a company would record on its books depends on how it acquired the patent.
  • If the business purchased the patent from the original holder, the value of the patent equals the acquisition cost.
  • The value of the patent may be increased if a patent holding company defends its rights to the invention in a lawsuit.

• Patents

  • But a patent is a blanket injunction against implementing a certain idea.
  • (For example, RedHat has pledged that open source projects are safe from its patents, see redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html.)
  • The patents are so unpredictable and so potentially broad that no card manufacturer can ever be certain it's safe, even after doing a patent search.
  • Grant of Patent License.
  • I've also written a blog post summarizing the arguments against software patents, at www.rants.org/2007/05/01/how-to-tell-that-software-patents-are-a-bad-idea/.

• Legal Barriers

  • The government creates legal barriers through patents, copyrights, and granting exclusive rights to companies.
  • Intellectual property rights, including copyright and patents, are an important example of legal barriers that give rise to monopolies.
  • During the term of the patent, the patent holder has the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the patented invention.
  • When a patent expires and the invention enters the public domain, others can build on the invention.
  • For example, when a pharmaceutical company first markets a drug, it is usually under a patent, and only the pharmaceutical company can sell it until the patent expires.

• Amortization of Intangible Assets

  • See the figure below for an example of a U.S. patent .
  • Scenario A: After 5 years Company X is sued for patent infringement and is required to hire a lawyer.
  • The patent lawyer charges $10,000 and is successful in defending Company X's patent.
  • The $10,000 spent to defend the patent is capitalized to the value of the patent on Company X's balance sheet and then amortized over the remaining 12 years of the patent's legal life.
  • As a result of the useful life of their patent being reduced from 17 years to just 5 years, the remaining unamortized value of $12,000 is expensed and the patent is written down to a value of $0.

• Limited-Life Impairment

  • A software company has a patent valued at $10 million with a useful life of 40 years.
  • Due to market conditions, the company believes the patent's value has decreased and tests it for impairment at the end of the year.
  • As a result of the impairment, the amortization expense on the patent should be adjusted to reflect the new value.
  • Limited-life intangibles are intangible assets with a limited useful life, such as copyrights, patents and trademarks
  • Examples of intangible assets with a limited-life include copyrights and patents.

• Investing in Research and Development

  • The government can do so by creating a good structure of intellectual property protection, called, broadly, patent law.
  • This atom will first discuss how the government can establish a patent system, and then ways in which it can directly affect the level of research and development in an economy.
  • Patents are temporary monopolies granted to inventors by the government, in exchange for public disclosure of how the invention works.
  • Essentially, a patent gives the holder the right to exclude others from, among other things, using, selling, and making the claimed invention.
  • Patents and, more broadly, intellectual property rights, are important because they encourage investment in research.

• Entry Barriers

  • The term can refer to hindrances a firm faces in trying to enter a market or industry—such as government regulation and patents, or a large, established firm taking advantage of economies of scale—or those an individual faces in trying to gain entrance to a profession—such as education or licensing requirements.
  • The most important barriers are economies of scale, patents, access to expensive and complex technology, and strategic actions by incumbent firms designed to discourage or destroy new entrants.
  • Pharmaceutical manufacturers are one type of company that generally rely on patents, which makes competition irrelevant for a period of time after development: competitors can't legally begin manufacturing the product until the patent expires.

• Legal Advice and Protection

  • If your company has a legal department, it can help a project by assisting with trademark issues, copyright license ownership and compatibility questions, defense against patent trolls, etc.
  • Some more concrete ideas of what sorts of legal help might be useful are discussed in Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents.

• The GPL

  • See the section called "The GNU General Public License" in Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents for details.
  • See The GNU Affero GPL: A Version of the GNU GPL for Server-Side Code in Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents for more.

• Aspects of Licenses

  • Both the GNU General Public License version 3 and the Apache License version 2 contain language designed to prevent people from using patent law to take away the rights granted (under copyright law) by the licenses.
  • They require contributors to grant patent licenses along with their contribution, covering any patents licenseable by the contributor that would be infringed by their contribution (or by the incorporation of their contribution into the work as a whole).
  • Then they go further: if someone using software under the license initiates patent litigation against another party, claiming that the covered work infringes, the initiator automatically loses all the patent grants otherwise provided for that work by the license, and in the case of the GPLv3 loses their right to distribute under the license altogether.