Sweden jurisdiction report: An annual ‘fridge check’ for IP
The same kind of service is needed for all IP owners. When you do your annual internal IP due diligence, checking out your IP portfolio in order to decide what to do with existing patents, trademarks and other registered rights the upcoming year, the first and most important advice is: do not throw it away as garbage.
When it comes to patents, it is well known that 1) many inventors do not have enough budget to use and take advantage of their rights; but that 2) licence agreements, cooperation, or even selling the IP rights can give the inventors the possibility to stay in business and continue to create new and useful technologies.
Such deals also open the door for others that have practical, functional and economically fruitful business ideas, but no access to the right technical (patented) rights.
In Sweden, we have seen many examples of young software inventors whose work is welcomed by global companies that often need that “little technical detail” to be added to their own more complicated solutions. There are also examples of cases where the buyer is willing to pay for your rights, just to make sure that you will not compete with their technology.
