Patents and licensing

patents

How Patents on Computer Technology Promote Competition

book The Copyright Wars - three centuries of trans- atlantic battle Peter Baldwin

examples

• a lot of value Warner-Lambert succeeded and Lipitor became one of the top selling drugs in the world, generating more than usd125 billion in sales over the life of the US patent

Lipitor becomes world's top-selling drug

• not much value? Information extraction from a database

The value of Google’s own intellectual property, including their patent on the PageRank algorithm that made their early search engine so effective, was not evident when it was patented. Page and Brin tried hard to sell the technology to an existing search engine company soon after they had deployed it, but could find no buyers offering anything close to the eventual value garnered.