Point of view... The necessity of standardized management of enterprise intellectual property assets is (II).

Published:

2022-11-02

2. Patent Asset Management For a long time, patents have been more about how to obtain patent rights in the concept of Chinese people, and it is already a higher understanding of how to use patents to occupy a larger market share and obtain higher profits. At present, there is not enough understanding. Patents are not only a tool to ensure the operation of the real economy, but also a means of production. The basic application of patents should be to integrate patents as means of production with other means of production and to realize economic value through innovation and market operation. The attribute of (I) means of production determines that patent assets should be managed in a standardized manner. Because patent information is a kind of digital information, patents have higher requirements for the controllability of the production process than physical production materials. Relatively speaking, digital information depends more on standardized management, but also because of its own digitization, once patented assets are standardized management, the risks it faces as a means of production in the production process are easier to control, in other words, The return on management is relatively high. As a kind of digital information, the process data such as patent information delivery needs strict process management to ensure that the process data are obtained, sorted and stored without omission, so as to determine what happened in the process of patent and its information generation, examination, authorization and implementation, which is helpful to find the node of the problem, so as to solve the related problems pertinently. There is such a fact that no matter what the subject of patents is, most of them are industrialized and create output value, and universities are the main subjects of patents, but the technical solutions required by universities to generate patents are mostly laboratory products. And most of them are inventions and creations of students without any engineering practice experience, and the probability of direct industrialization is relatively low. However, students who are not bound by various practical experience and knowledge of engineering are more likely to come up with some novel solutions, which may represent the future development direction of a certain technology. In the process of implementing university patents to enterprises, it is often necessary to make substantial changes to the corresponding patented technology to meet the needs of the project, and the resulting new technological achievements are often more easily accepted by the market. Some of these technological achievements have a certain probability of becoming new patents. Compared with university patents, these new patents often have a higher restriction on the market operation of related products. The university patent is far from the engineering program, and even changes in principle, which does not have any impact on the market operation of related products. School-enterprise cooperation is a good thing, but when there is income, especially when the income is relatively high, it is likely to cause disputes. The key is that the market operation has a dominant role in the patent, the patent right of these patents and the integrity of the patent right to the promotion and application of related products often have a great impact. It should be known that even if the school-enterprise cooperation is bound by the relevant technology contract, the performance of the contract will often produce various situations due to the realization of technology, which may lead to the ownership of new technological achievements in an uncertain state. The integrity of patent rights has a great impact on enterprises, even if the rights are shared, such as universities and colleges that share the rights, there is still room for others to implement the common patent rights, which may result in the unfavorable market structure of enterprises. The complexity of (II) patent factors determines that patent assets should be managed in a standardized manner. There are three main factors to be considered in the management of patent assets, namely, legal, technical and industrial factors, and the following is an example of the areas of concern corresponding to legal factors: Legal factors include, but are not limited to, the integrity of ownership, the degree of legal protection, the stability of rights, dependence, the judgment of patent infringement, and the remaining useful life. The integrity of the ownership has been covered in the previous article. This alone is enough to have a great impact on the market structure of related products, and the integrity of the ownership is only one of the patent legal factors that should be paid attention to. Therefore, only the standardized management of patent assets can reduce the risks caused by management problems. For example, the degree of legal protection depends on the quality of the patent text, the degree of coverage of the claims and the legal status. As for the quality of writing, enough attention has been paid in recent years, but there is still a lot of room for the improvement of the overall quality of writing. There are many discussions in the industry, so I will not repeat them here. As for the legal status, in short, that is, the current stage of the patent or patent application and the corresponding technological achievement, it is necessary to know that the plasticity of different stages is different and the degree of accumulation is different. In addition, the degree of coverage of the claims is also related to the quality of writing, in other words, an extension of the quality of writing, which is discussed more in the industry and will not be repeated here. Regarding the stability of rights, there is an inappropriate case for reference. Affected by the social awareness of patents, many market entities are accustomed to market layout before applying for patents, or even not applying for patents, which may lead to Loss of rights or direct acquisition by others. According to the law alone, sales constitute disclosure in the sense of patent law, resulting in the disclosure of technical achievements as a carrier, and the patent converted from the technical achievements may not meet the provisions of novelty and be invalid (the examination stage does not examine the disclosure of facts including sales). However, many facts will be diluted due to the advancement of time, resulting in objective facts that cannot be reproduced by available means. Therefore, public actions such as prior sales do not necessarily cause the relevant patents to be invalidated because they do not meet the novelty requirements., Making the relevant rights gradually stabilize with the advancement of time. If an enterprise ignores the various factors that affect the stability of rights, on the one hand, it may lead to an unstable base of patent rights held, and on the other hand, it may lead to competitors acquiring relevant patents, and after a certain point in time has passed, the unstable patents may tend to be stable and difficult to invalidate. Limited by space, this paper only describes the complexity of the patent factors, and the various factors will not be described. From the above description of the limited content, it can be seen that if the patent assets are not standardized, it is difficult to cover all aspects of the patent factor, and may put their own market layout at risk. The diversity of (III) patents determines the standardized management of patent assets. In terms of broad distinctions, patents are acquired in the form of original acquisition and subsequent acquisition. Among them, the original acquisition of the dispute stems from the expected authorized technology is independent development, commissioned development, cooperative development, or other forms of research and development behavior and other basic forms of technological achievements, the basic form of development behavior there are many controllable or uncontrollable factors, resulting in unclear ownership of technological achievements, and affect the resulting determination of patent rights. Similarly, for example, foundry, commissioned processing, supporting, etc. are likely to produce new enough to affect the market layout of the technology. For example, contract manufacturing, typically, many domestic enterprises were contract manufacturing enterprises of some foreign enterprises in the early years, and later developed into enterprises that competed with the contract manufacturing enterprises, and the main problem lies in the lack of control over technological achievements; on the contrary, there is another phenomenon in China, that is, some enterprises gradually become contract manufacturing enterprises of other enterprises, lack of innovation ability or improper control of technological achievements is one of the main reasons. There are similar problems in commissioned processing and matching, which will not be elaborated here. In addition, the enterprise's own technological iteration in the industrialization process is the basis for the generation of valuable patents, obviously, the implementation of existing patents is the basis for testing its market adaptability, and the identification and adaptive adjustment of obstacles in the industrialization process of existing patented technology is the premise of the generation of valuable patents. There are relatively many ways to follow the acquisition, which can be the active behavior of the transferee or passive acceptance. The dilemma of subsequent patents is mostly due to the fact that the transferee's technology acquired based on the transfer constitutes a fragmented system, and the subsequent patents are, in more cases, technologies eliminated by others, and have little effect on market operations. In addition, the subsequent patents are also affected by the research and development background, because the party that transfers the patent is often the party that has a certain accumulation in related fields, and it is the party that is more likely to produce alternative technologies. One of the basic indicators of patent value is replaceability. It should be known that when the replaceability of a certain patent is relatively enhanced, its own value will weaken. Generally speaking, the transferee of patents is a relatively weak party, but the behavior of a company shows that the hash distribution of patents in related fields may be directly related to the company's market layout, in order to improve their own control, the acquisition of target patents has become one of the ways for such enterprises to improve the enterprise's patent layout. Patent transfer has become a controversial game in the behavior of some entities, known as non-patent enforcement entities, commonly known as patent trolls. The famous iPEL in the industry was founded by Brian Yates, a former California lawyer. There are more than 40 technology companies under the name of IPELT, and these technology companies are basically non-patent implementation entities. Among them, the American Global Innovation Aggregation Co., Ltd. has acquired some patents held by domestic patentees including Huawei and ZTE, and hold these patents in the country against Asus, Sony, Extreme Network, NetEase, Blizzard and other patent infringement proceedings. The non-patented implementing entity is a unilateral attack with no defense, because it does not implement the patent itself, and the accused infringer has no industrial goal to counter it. For most enterprises, such as the patent war between Huawei and Qualcomm, there are attacks and defenses, which requires the first attacked party to hold some patents that can counter the other party, that is, the attacked party is required to have a certain amount of patents, which will inevitably arouse attention to the next article. When the number of (IV) patents held is large, there will be higher requirements for the standardized management of patent assets. An investigation agency in the United States once conducted a survey, and the result of the survey was that about 5-10% of the patents held by an innovative company will never be used again in the future. These patents are not assets, but burdens for companies. Therefore, it is very necessary to take stock of the patents held, especially when the proportion of patents that can be implemented by Chinese enterprises is relatively low. It will be very easy to take stock of patents under the condition of standardized management of patent assets. For patentees with a certain amount of patents, there are relatively few or even no patents in isolation, and regular patent asset management should include grouping management, so as to maximize the value of patent assets through patent integration, and at the same time, it is easy to check and fill gaps according to the integrated patent layout. Patents held by a company are often not distributed in the field of technology, even if they are not in the same field of technology, they will be related to the field of technology. For diversified companies, the same applies in a particular industry direction. But even if the same company holds a large number of patents, the relationship between patents will become very complicated. The relationship between patents includes, but is not limited to, obstacles, substitutions, and complementarities, mainly due to the accumulation, iteration, and change of technological achievements. Strictly speaking, a patent right is an exclusive right, and the ability to exclude others from use does not mean that the right holder is free to use it himself, but lies in the aforementioned obstacle relationship. For example, the implementation of a subordinate patent in the sense of patent law depends on the implementation of the subordinate underlying patent, so the implementation of the subordinate patent is subject to the underlying patent, and if the holder of the underlying patent is someone else, it is an obstacle to the holder of the subordinate patent. The barrier relationship is also manifested in a two-way barrier relationship, which is manifested in the fact that the party holding the basic patent may be the originator of the abstract technical solution, for example, it may be a pioneer in a certain technical direction. Pioneering means nothing, and from scratch means immaturity. The patent held by the party holding the subordinate patent may be the result of technological iteration, and the party holding the basic patent may seek to implement the subordinate patent, thus forming a two-way barrier relationship between the basic patent and the subordinate patent. Substitution and complementarity relationships are only used in this paper to further show that there are relatively many factors to consider when the number of patents held is large, and the necessity of standardized management of patent assets is particularly important, which is detailed in this paper. Conclusion This paper takes trade secrets and patents as an example to illustrate the necessity of standardized management of intellectual property assets of enterprises, and the standardized management of intellectual property assets is a necessary condition for the production of intellectual property materials, the underlying logic to enhance the awareness of intellectual property rights of enterprise management and employees, and the basis for promoting independent innovation and sustainable and healthy development of enterprises. The standardized management of intellectual property assets is conducive to the establishment of links with physical assets, the protection of the value-added of physical assets, but also the basis for dealing with all kinds of intellectual property risks in the market, so as to improve the market control ability of enterprises, maintain and consolidate the competitive advantage of enterprises.

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