Understanding the IP Wars

[Commentary] Patents are technical and legal documents, each one costing about the price of a new Fiat 500 to draft. There is a very small community of IP professionals who write, prosecute and sell these assets. Of the over 1,000,000 attorneys in the United States, only 30,000 or so have passed the Patent Bar. So few, in fact, that the USPTO allows scientists and engineers to take the exam, adding about 10,000 more “Patent Agents” admitted to practice patent law before the USPTO. This means that at any given time, depending on the technology area, there are only a few thousand people who really have any idea what a given patent likely covers, or what it’s potentially worth. And that is at the core of all these IP wars. The entire reason the patent system exists is that the Government wants to buy something from inventors: disclosure. Society benefits when inventors disclose their ideas so that later innovators can learn from, reproduce, and build upon or around those ideas. What the Government gives the inventor is exclusivity — it grants the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling, those new innovations.

[Erin-Michael Gill is Managing Director and Chief Intellectual Property Officer of MDB Capital.]