New point of view – Are your patents assets or liabilities?
The commonsense view of intelligent property has become known by the general public in recent years, which allows either persons or firms to realize that a certain degree of the protection is gained during the legal period after filing patent applications and having their own creativity approved as a patent. Nevertheless, it is an easily ignorable question as to whether there’s an equal protection for applying a patent for most patentees. If the applied patent turns out to be not worthwhile (having no protective effect), such patents are debts rather than assets.
It is a subjective view how much value does a patent have, and a patent has different values for different purposes such as in lawsuit or sale. However, certain objective standards have been adopted for determining whether a patent is valuable or not, such as the protection scope of the patent claims and whether the claimed contents are supported by the specified embodiment, whether there’re contradictions appeared in the response briefs, or whether there are obstacles to asserting the patent right. It is still powerful when a mediocre lawyer incorporates the assertion of the patent right with a valuable patent. By contrast, a worthless patent does not have any advantages in the patent battle even if handled by a competent lawyer, and eventually throwing good money after bad (if the patent is withdrawn).
The value of the patent relies heavily on the patent firms. If they can help the clients to apply valuable patents, then naturally the belief that “the intellectual property department belongs to the cost department” can be broken. In fact, the rising Non-Practicing Entity (NPE) in the occident basically comprises the members from the patent firms or intellectual property departments in the industry. Since NPE are powerful profit entities, the key point is to make and turn the NPE patents into assets rather than debts. In conclusion, it indeed depends on the collective efforts of all patent practitioners and the proper cognitions of the enterprises in order to gain profit and be benefited by the patents applied by the compatriots.