In the United States, technology companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars to defend patent-infringement lawsuits by companies that make a business of buying technology patents primarily for suing software companies and makers of products like smartphones.
Its armies of lawyers aggressively defend patents, even flimsy ones taken out on minor tweaks to existing treatments.
At the same time, pharma bosses are being asked to defend patents in costly legal battles against an increasingly confident and litigious generics industry.
A decade ago Britain's GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) got a bloody nose in South Africa when it tried too vigorously to defend patents on an HIV drug.
James R. Klaiber, an intellectual property lawyer with Pryor Cashman in New York, says he believes there is another side to the issue: many start-ups defend patents they are not using, he said, to maintain the company's value.
The choice of the US government, under the duress of 'big pharma', to stubbornly defend patents on antiretroviral drugs, indirectly led to the deaths of some 10 million people.
It serves as a reminder that Chinese companies are just as eager to defend patents as Western firms, and that China's intellectual-property regime has been tightened in recent years.Long the workshop of the world, China wants to be the brains as well.
Because defending patent cases is expensive and time-consuming, many defendants feel compelled to settle such cases even if they are without merit.
A terrible week for consumer electronics firm Samsung got significantly worse on Tuesday as the US supreme court expressed limited patience for arguments defending patent infringements against Apple's iPhone.
We made an important assumption in our research: We thought that the people bearing most of the cost defending patent lawsuits are people who have inadvertently infringed on some patent.
One potential concern: defending patents already on the books.
