Intellectual Capital is the core of any technology business. But how do you know which Intellectual Property Rights actually apply to your Intellectual Capital? What do you own? What can you own?
We provide answers to these questions and more.
What is the extent of your Intellectual Property Rights? How much is protected, and how far does that protection reach? How afraid should you be of your competitors Intellectual Property Rights?
We provide answers to these questions and more.
Do you use your Intellectual Capital in the right way? How do Intellectual Property Rights fit in your business model and revenue model? Do you get the most out of them, or could you increase your revenue?
We provide answers to these questions and more.
What is the best way to protect your Intellectual Capital? Should you register and seek exclusivity? Or publishing and prevent others from obtaining exclusivity?
Protection or openness? How to handle Open Source?
We provide answers to these questions and more.
What is your IP policy? What is your Open Source policy? How does IP support your strategy, and what is your strategy around your Intellectual Capital?
We provide answers to these questions and more.
Intellectual Capital is the core of any technology business. We help these businesses and their investors to integrate Intellectual Property Rights better into their business model.
With the explosion of data, IPRs are under threat. IPRs aim to create artificial scarcity, but the growth of data under IPR protection is vastly inferior to the growth of non-protected (“open”) data. Because of their characteristics, IPRs are not able to tackle the growth of Big Data, and will therefore probably drown in a sea of data. I’ve recently learned what a Zettabyte is. As Wikipedia explains, it’s a unit of information (data), equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. EMC has calculated that, in the year 2011, humanity and its machines have created 1.8 zettabytes of information. That’s more data than created in the whole of human history until the end of 2009 included (roughly 150,000 years), and more than three Read more ...
Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are curious beasts. They are, in essence, negative rights: they give the right to block other people from doing something. Unlike normal property rights, they are not positive rights: it’s not because you have a patent on a technology, that you’re actually allowed to use it – that’s not what a Read more …
The conflict between Hollywood and Silicon Valley is, at a deeper level, one between Content and Function, which I think Function will win. But there’s more: Content is also struggling, because there is simply too much of it. The combination of a data flood of biblical proportions with exploding possibility of function, will drown any Read more …
Technology is breaking down the distinction between Content and Function. This has a profound effect on Business Models based on IP rights. The SOPA discussion is a good example of the fight between Function and Content – which IP right will win? What is Content, what is Function? Content is the stuff you access Read more …
In an earlier post (read it here) I wrote about self-driving cars, and how they have the potential to change our society a lot. No more people dying on the roads, no more traffic jams, important reduction of CO2 exhaust, but also massive job losses for car insurance people, taxi drivers, etc. I concluded by Read more …
Open Source hardware is the next step in the development of “open” licenses; A review of the most important OS hardware licenses show them to be a combination of known techniques, like creative commons, and “covenant not to sue” for patents or design rights; Their validity and enforceability seem somewhat weaker than the software Open Read more …
We are uploading digital versions of ourselves into social media – we have different layers of existence now. Those digital persons are like digital slaves, owned by the social media. Current IPRs are an important part of the digital shackles. We will need digital human rights to do away with digital slavery. Any science fiction Read more …
I gave a presentation at the British Library on 29th November 2011 (#OIBL) – here is a written down version of that presentation. The key point I made was that Open Innovation benefits greatly from properly functioning Intellectual Property Rights. My particular focus was on copyright, which I believe is broken up to the point Read more …
At TEDx Brussels recently, Paul Rojas made a presentation (you can see it here) about a car driven by a computer. The project has been very successful; from a technology point of view, a human driver is, today, no longer necessary. That got me thinking – would it be a good idea to abolish human Read more …
Intellectual Property Rights (“IPRs”) are hot in the media these days. Headlines about patent trolls, the great patent bubble, patent warfare, pirate parties and the broken patent system appear almost daily. This is good, because there are obvious problems with our IPR system. It seems that most observers are agreeing that the current IPR system risks Read more …
Is the Belgian legal system light-years away from understanding or using basic contemporary technology, and therefore uniquely disqualified to rule on any IP issues around such technology? The Court of Appeal of Antwerp, Belgium’s second city, ruled on a request to block access to the Pirate Bay website on 26th September 2011. Many people have Read more …