May 10, 2010
Collecting Royalties under a Patent License
Professor Dennis Crouch of Patently-O recently posted an article about the difficulties in collecting royalties pursuant to a patent licensing agreement. In his post, Professor Crouch referenced a report by Invotex, which noted that 86% of licensees misreported their royalties to their licensor. This, unfortunately, is not surprising, and is part of the reason why the process of entering into a patent (or any IP) licensing agreement can be so time consuming.
The Invotex report sets forth some of the very issues that a patent licensing attorney tries to avoid when entering into a licensing agreement on behalf of a client that is the licensor. Often times, however, the negotiation process does not allow for the “tight” agreement that the licensor’s attorney wants. Instead, licensing agreements can often be open to interpretation.
Some of the royalty reporting errors indicated in the Invotex report include questionable license interpretation, underreported sales, disallowed deductions, underreported sublicenses, and math errors. There are, of course, ways to avoid these various debacles in the contracts.
November 12, 2009
Patently-O’s First-to-File Survey
Professor Dennis Crouch
University of Missouri
School of Law
Not that we want to club anyone to death with stories about first-to-file patent reform, but given that Director Kappos has begun beating the patent reform drum, it’s becoming more important that all the facts are known. Up to now, there really hasn’t been any consensus on whether moving to a first-to-file priority system would be a drastic change. Dennis Crouch, over at Patently-O, insists that the Director may be using flawed statistics to demonstrate that change will not be so bad. Interestingly enough, after Professor Crouch and a few others posted comments about it on Director Kappos’s blog, the comments were closed off, ending the discussion on that forum. I guess Mr. Kappos is not really interested in hearing from the patent community — despite portraying that he will listen to feedback.
In an effort to come up with some real numbers, Professor Crouch has created a survey that is designed to record the position of patent professionals on this issue. If you have an opinion, one way or the other, you should take a minute, click over, and take the survey. You can’t complain later about how things end up, if you didn’t participate in the discussion.
UPDATE: It looks like Kappos’s blog has let through a few more comments, but they are clearly censoring responses.
