Don't we demand proof of such responsibility when we license someone to drive on our highways?
Producing original material is a very different business from licensing someone else's shows.
"I see one or two business plans a week" from companies seeking to license someone else's drug, said Brian G. Atwood, a managing director at Versant Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif.
He launches into a complaint about the cost of licensing for someone to get their real estate license, and the cost imposed by government regulators for women to get a license for braiding hair.
"They'd licensed someone else's technology.
So we may talk about "licensing one's intellectual property", and mean either selling a license to someone to make use of your patented ideas, or selling a license to build, distribute or use a product, as ARM does with its processor and other designs or a tools company does with its compiler and OS products.
You granted a license to someone to use your trademark and they are using it according to the terms of that license.
American law is very clear: when the United States government needs a patented product, any official authorized to make purchases can ignore the patent and license someone else to make it.
But if you don't have one, and you're sick of the bench, why not see what you can license from someone else? Hey, the Canadian Space Agency is looking for someone to license their patented methods for alleviating motion sickness for nonspace applications--maybe you can sell this to grad students who spend too much time staring at the "belly dancer" orbital shaker?
One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers' licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network.
Many countries refuse to allow a patentee to "sit" on his invention in this fashion and instead compel him to "work" the patented technology, either by commercializing it or by licensing it to someone who will.
