The companies buy bundles of patents and make money by threatening infringement lawsuits.
They produce the majority of new products, and obtain more patents and make more discoveries than large companies.
By signing licenses, Roche is hoping to avoid having governments seize patents and make the drugs on their own.
Under Trips, signatory states can pass clauses, as South Africa has tried to do, to bypass patents and make or buy cheaper drugs in cases of "dire emergency", and few could argue Aids is less than that.
But that did not stop him from suing car manufacturers for infringing on his "hard-earned" patent, forcing them to pay him royalties.Although some patent portfolio managers, such as Intellectual Ventures, generate many of their own inventions, many others simply acquire patents and make money by suing firms that infringe them.
One study by Mr. West and another physicist, Luís Bettencourt, Mr. Lehrer writes, suggests that "a person living in a metropolis of one million should generate, on average, about 15 percent more patents and make 15 percent more money than a person living in a city of 500,000".
Instead of individual companies spending cash to build up defensive patent portfolios, companies like California-based RPX buy up patents and make them available to their customers, who pay an annual subscription.
I hope lawmakers will consider these complexities and, more importantly, the stories that are included in the report in order to understand what it is like to be a startup facing a patent demand — though it's not always easy reading. 1) Fund the PTO so that only truly novel inventions get patents and make low-cost and collaborative access to post-grant review available.
It's patented, and made in Norway, by Norwegians.
