Keeping an eye on the competition - reviewing the activity surrounding patents
As well as filing and maintaining your own patents, another aspect of managing a patent portfolio involves monitoring the activity of your competitors. This involves watching the progress of applications through the examination process, checking the legal status of others’ patents, and monitoring new inventions and the expansion of patent families. But what about other related activities?
Many companies are now partnering with others for R&D, or buying expertise or technologies needed to bring a product to market that may involve licensing patents from others.
As companies put increasing emphasis on maximising the potential of their patent portfolio by licensing, partnering and assigning patents that are outside of their core technology, the importance of looking outside of patent databases will also increase. Companies can exploit outside technologies by an assignment or a licence. An assignment gives the third party complete rights over the patent, whereas the licence may give the licensee rights over only certain aspects of the invention.
Assignments will generally be recorded in file histories at patent offices around the world and made available via the International Patent Document Center (INPADOC) database, while licences are typically kept confidential or are leaked only in certain circumstances.
Press releases, annual reports, trade press and other sources can be searched for information on licences, but only if the parties agree to make this public. It is a good idea to monitor a competitor’s partnerships both with other businesses and with research organisations.
INPADOC records change of ownership or transfer of rights of patents via change of owner, licensing, transfer assignments and changes of address for patents from Australia, Brazil, China, the European Patent Office, Switzerland, the US and the Patent Cooperation Treaty, but no licensing or assignment information is available for India, Japan or Korea.
