Survey of Patent Pools Demonstrates Variety of Purposes and Management Structures

David Serafino, Knowledge Ecology International

6/28/2010
(Original Publish Date: 6/4/2007)

The collective management of intellectual property rights is a term used to describe methods of managing large portfolios of intellectual property assets, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, know-how and data. Patent pools are one such mechanism. A "patent pool" is an agreement between two or more patent owners to license one or more of their patents to one another or to third parties. In its 2001 White Paper on Patent Pools, the USPTO said, patent pool allows interested parties to gather all the necessary tools to practice a certain technology in one place, e.g, "one-stop shopping", rather than obtaining licenses from each patent owner individually.