Defensive termination

Licensing of patents
Overviews
Licensing Royalties
Types
Compulsory licensing Cross-licensing Defensive Patent License Defensive termination Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND, RAND) Shop right
Strategies
Catch and release Defensive patent aggregation Patentleft Patent monetization Patent pool Stick licensing
Clauses in patent licenses
Field-of-use limitation

Defensive termination is a form of implicit cross licensing of patent or other intellectual property rights. Consider a case where company A licenses patent A to company B. One of the conditions of the license agreement is that if company B should ever sue company A for infringing one of company B’s own patents, such as patent B, then Company A can terminate the license to patent A. Thus company A would be able to counter sue company B for infringing patent A. This is a strong incentive to prevent company B from suing company A for any future patent it might receive after it has licensed patent A.^[1]

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, for example, has a defensive termination clause built into its "Eco-Patent Commons".^[2]

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/26/2011. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.