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Insights relating to patents
The patent is rarely where the money is decided. The licence is. Three IP developments from the past week make that point, and each turns on terms settled, or left unsettled, long before anyone reached a court. In the United Kingdom, the government has published…
If AI collapses the cost of making your product, the question is no longer how cheaply you can make it. It is what stops a competitor making the same thing. That is a trade secret and patent question, and most AI strategies never get to…
There are two ways to hold a position in a technology. You can own the technology. Or you can own what it takes to build and install the technology at volume. They are not the same asset, and only one of them is scarce. China…
Adding AI to a product is not a strategy. Moving to where the value is going is. And every real move changes what your company controls, which makes it an IP strategy decision before it is a technology one. An article in I by IMD…
A treatment that works once and keeps working for years is a very different commercial asset from a pill taken every day. The value is created up front. It then has to be defended for decades. That turns the patent vs trade secret question into…
Patent law only pays for outliers. Novelty and inventive step exist to screen out the expected, so a patent portfolio is, by design, a collection of exceptions. Hold that thought against new research from Harvard, Wharton, Northwestern and Columbia, published in Harvard Business Review on…
Most boards plan around a single date. The patent expires, competitors arrive, the revenue line falls off a ledge. That model is tidy, it sits in the forecast, and for high-value products it is usually wrong. A recent analysis on DrugPatentWatch works through the loss-of-exclusivity…
Intellectual property rights don’t dissolve the moment you stop paying attention to them. That’s the thread running through several developments last week, and it’s worth more attention than most companies give it, because the moment you decide to stop using a mark, retire a product…
If a capability you spent years building can be downloaded on a Sunday afternoon, the question is not how to stop that. It is what you own that survives it. Ben Thompson’s recent Stratechery piece works through the economics of the new Chinese open-weight models…
The most expensive failures in R&D are not the projects that fail. They are the projects that should never have started — and the ones that limp along because nobody had the evidence to kill them early. Patsnap’s 2026 R&D Benchmark Report puts numbers on…
July was a month about ownership. Not compliance, not litigation skill – ownership. Google’s edge sits on TPU technology that competitors must come back and license. Sanofi lost the mRNA product race and is now taxing the winners through delivery patents it happens to hold.…
What happens when intellectual property built into your products turns out to belong to someone else? This week supplied three expensive answers. Each involved one of the world’s most powerful companies paying – or being ordered to pay – for rights held by a much…
Over the past two decades, US firm value flipped from mostly tangible to over 90% intangible — and the rulebook for defending those intangibles quietly rewrote itself underneath everyone. A recent Cornerstone Research study, Intellectual Property Litigation: U.S. Trends in Global Perspective (June 2026), maps…
The most valuable intellectual property in your business is often not the product your customers see — it’s the platform underneath it: the data it learned from, the delivery technology it rides on, the foundational patents everything else is built over. Several developments this past…
What actually decides an IP dispute — the strength of your rights, or the machinery around them? This past week delivered three very different answers to that question, and each one points to the same conclusion for business leaders: outcomes are built long before anyone…
Intellectual property rarely fails loudly. It fails in the gap between filing and follow-through — the priority date no one re-checked, the order no one renewed, the AI agent no one supervised. This month’s posts make one point together: the threat to your most valuable…
The most valuable lesson in intellectual property this week wasn’t a single ruling — it was a pattern. Across a landmark licensing deal, a patent that collapsed over one character, and a Congressional hearing on the rules themselves, the same question kept surfacing: is your…
A former engineer leaves, starts a company, and files a patent. Months later the original employer discovers the application describes technology that looks remarkably like a project the engineer worked on internally. This is one of the more under-managed risks in any R&D-heavy business —…
IP Organiser’s recently compiled record of every pharmaceutical patent term extension granted in Australia maps roughly 1,600 extended patents across 850 products, and the patterns are worth reading closely. Activity is concentrated: a handful of originators (Novartis well out in front, then Pfizer, Roche, AstraZeneca…
Amending the basis of your validity challenge in patent litigation is never just a procedural move — it is a strategic play with real commercial consequences. What stands out in AstraZeneca AB v Pharmacor Pty Ltd (No 3) [2026] FCA 565 is a good reminder…
Widening a patent claim is never free. Every limitation you drop to capture more of the market quietly commits you to two things: a disclosure that actually supports the wider claim, and a priority date that can still carry it. Lose sight of either, and…
A McKinsey study found that 44% of directors said their boards simply reviewed and approved management’s proposed strategies—and only 10% felt they fully understood the industry dynamics they were governing. For IP-intensive businesses, that gap is expensive. Inventions, brands, data and know-how are often the…
The most valuable thing a competitor can do to your patent is comply with the law around it. That is the quiet lesson for IP-intensive businesses in the US Supreme Court’s unanimous June 2026 ruling in Hikma v. Amarin (read it here). Amarin held a…
A patent settlement can look perfectly clean on its face and still carry antitrust risk buried in its economics. That is the lesson from an $885 million jury verdict handed down in Boston this month, where Takeda was found liable for effectively paying a generic…
The Unified Patent Court has signalled that its reach extends well beyond its own member states, and IP-intensive businesses should take note. In its 2 June 2026 decision in Fujifilm v Kodak, the UPC Court of Appeal confirmed that Article 34 of the UPC Agreement…
Strip the case names away and one pattern runs through this month’s posts: the decisive moment in an IP matter almost never happens in the courtroom. It happens years earlier — in the words drafted into a claim, the honesty of a brand at first…
A decade-long battle over an anti-scaling method for the Bayer process has just delivered a sharp reminder that patent claims are commercial instruments, not afterthoughts. In Nalco Company v Cytec Industries Inc [2026] FCAFC 72, the Full Federal Court upheld findings that Nalco’s original claims…
How quickly a patent can lose its strategic value when the underlying disclosure isn’t built to withstand real‑world scrutiny. In the Federal Court’s decision in Orikan v VMS (No 2), Orikan’s infringement case faltered on multiple grounds, but most interestingly because the patent specification couldn’t…
The recent McKinsey article “Using AI to boost productivity is unlikely to create a sustainable advantage” (read it here) offers a timely reminder for business owners with valuable IP portfolios: AI-driven efficiency gains won’t deliver lasting advantage, but using AI to reshape offerings, business models,…
The Davies v Lazer Safe decision is a timely reminder that in IP disputes, leverage often sits in the procedural details. The Court clarified that an old filing restriction—tied to documents from long‑finished litigation—had nothing to do with Mr Davies’ attempt to bring a new…
