Cross licensing
Under cross-licensing (Engl. Cross-Licensing ) an agreement between two parties (mostly companies) understood that granted reciprocal permission patents to use the respective other party. The mutual recognition takes place either without additional license fees if there are approximately equivalent patent stocks or on the basis of a one-off payment. In addition to existing patents, this agreement can also include future patents.
A lawsuit for patent infringement can be responded to with a counterclaim based on its own patent portfolio (provided that the first plaintiff itself has products that could contain patent infringements; see Patent Troll ) in order to be able to reach a settlement. Cross-licensing prevents companies from blocking each other with time-consuming and costly patent suits and counterclaims.
Cross-licensing is criticized because two parties agree on rights of use in bilateral negotiations . This enables competitive advantages over third parties to be achieved, since licenses that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to obtain are agreed and, if necessary, no or only low additional license fees are necessary for the use of the patent. The mutual recognition of patents is often based on large patent inventories, which tends to disadvantage companies with smaller patent inventories.
literature
- Mahdi Daneshzadeh Tabrizi: Licenses in bankruptcy after the failure of the law introducing a § 108a InsO, 2011 [1]
- Gassmann, Bader: Patent Management: Successfully Using and Protecting Innovations. Springer 2010.3. Edition.