1 December 2012Copyright

Patents reloaded: new emphasis at the IP summit

On December 6 and 7, 2012 in Brussels, the pan-European Intellectual Property Summit, ‘Patents Reloaded’, will lay the ground for IP in the boardroom. And that’s a good thing, not only for IP in itself, but also for innovation, growth and the economy as a whole.

The CEOs of Technicolor, Rockstar Consortium and Mosaid will speak at the IP Summit, along with the president of Novozymes Europe and the chief IP officer of Ericsson.

These companies own huge patent portfolios and are particularly skilled at using them as strategic weapons. Whether it’s licensing or litigation, patents are big business now, and dealing with them is a fact of corporate life.

As the first part of a two-headed IP Summit this year—the other being the IP Summit, ‘Regenerating Trademarks’, on December 10 and 11 in Alicante, Spain—the two days focusing on patents will deliver on both the institutional and the business sides of IP.

From the institutional point of view, the EU unitary patent has made considerable progress since 2010. Although it now looks crippled following its rejection by the European Parliament in its first reading, the text must be re-examined around the dates of the IP Summit.

After more than 40 years of negotiations on the topic, many are saying that no-one has any interest in being responsible for a failure. In the meantime, the IP Summit prefers to bet on a future success, helping to solve the issues through fruitful debates, including how to build the guidelines for the Unified Patent Court.

Among the first workshops, a discussion will take place between Judges Dr Klaus Grabinski of the German Federal Supreme Court and Samuel Granata of the Commercial Court Antwerp, along with Thierry Sueur of Air Liquide representing the voice of the industry through his role at BusinessEurope, the European confederation of industries. The debate will be moderated by Willem Hoyng, partner at Hoyng Monegier LLP, knowledge partner of the IP Summit.

Other major workshops on the institutional side will include one on trade secrets with PSA Peugeot Citroën, AkzoNobel and BMC Soft ware talking about new legislation under way at the EC Internal Market Directorate General. Th e IP Summit will also cover other topics such as grace periods, the America Invents Act, and of course harmonisation on a worldwide scale with the Patent Cooperation Treaty reform, Patent Prosecution Highway 2.0 and others.

On the business side, several workshops will tackle the ‘patent wars’ phenomenon from various angles (off ensive and defensive strategies, antitrust, essential patents, non-practising entities, and more), with speakers from Ericsson, Google, Nokia, Qualcomm, Renesas Corporation, Research in Motion, RPX Corporation, Papst Licensing and Article One Partners.

Among other business-oriented panels, one on open innovation will feature a discussion between Beiersdorf, Telefónica and the Swiss Krono Group. Technology transfer and collaboration between public R&D and private companies will allow France Brevets, the Fraunhöfer Institute and Qinetiq Ltd to express their views.

Still in the same vein, there will also be discussion of due diligence and risks, as well as the acquisition of IP rights portfolios, with Philips Intellectual Property & Standards, GE Healthcare and Vossius & Vossius.

On slightly different topics, the IP Summit will also offer workshops in the fields of pharmaceuticals and biotechnologies, from the viewpoints of litigation and the ‘stem cells debate’ with, notably, Osiris Therapeutics. One of its treatments has recently obtained the world’s first approval of its kind for commercialisation in Canada and New Zealand.

There will be focuses on India and China. For the latter, the IP rights director of ZTE Corporation will come to present his strategies along with European companies Seb Group and Messier Bugatti Dowty.

This is just a taster of what we can expect from the IP Summit—come to Brussels to find out more.

Regular programme updates for both IP Summits 2012 and speakers can be found online at www.ipsummit.info

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1 September 2012   The pan-European Intellectual Property Summit returns for its fifth year, and this time it has grown from two to four days across two different countries, as Premier Cercle, the co-organiser, explains.