"It's a very hard life being a licensee.
By contrast, Calvin Klein, who had licensed the manufacture of his jeans and underwear, cared a lot: in 2000, enraged by seeing his jeans on sale in cut-price outlets such as Costco, he sued Warnaco, his licensee, for breach of contract.The trend now is for labels to buy back their licences.
Harvard and its licensee, DuPont, however, had the rights to any mice created using the new techniques, even ones created by independent labs.
It builds cars with a licensee in Iran and opened a factory in Ukraine last year.Sales of 7.6 billion yuan ($1 billion) in 2007 and profits of 937m yuan were enough to make Great Wall the most valuable listed carmaker in China, despite having much lower output volumes than its main domestic rivals.
This forced the South Koreans to license the technology; such deals usually bar any transfer to another company if the licensee is taken over.
James Snider at the New America Foundation, a think-tank in Washington, DC, estimates that America's airwaves would have been worth $771 billion in 2001 (when he last did the sums) if every licensee were to use his bandwidth for the service in most demand by the public.
The latter category is the most sensitive to a change in policy, as it includes all services subsectors not related to transport or travel, including communications, construction and insurance; financial services; computer and information services; royalties and licensee fees; and other business services.
The licensee bears the risk and the designer reaps a reward.The problem is in the long term.
Politicians immediately considered legislation to compel the German maker of an anti-anthrax drug to grant a licence for its production only months after American trade officials had lambasted poor countries for considering something similar for AIDS drugs.More such hypocrisy will be exposed as the rich world becomes a licensee as well as a licensor of technology.
Haldia is already a licensee of Basell's technology in commodity plastics, and might fancy direct access to Basell's wide expertise in more upmarket stuff.
His Thai licensee, Chaleo Yoovidhya, had a tonic syrup called Krating Daeng in his portfolio.
