Co-ownership of Intellectual Property Rights - The Complexities Unravelled - Webinar

Introduction

This webinar will look at intellectual property rights (‘IPR’) (specifically, patents, copyright, designs and trade marks) as legal assets that can be jointly owned/held by multiple parties or co-owners, the default rules that apply to such co-ownership arrangements in the absence of expressly agreed terms, and the advantages and disadvantages of those default rules versus express agreements.

Shared ownership of IPR can be a complex area for many reasons; the intangible nature of the property, the difficulties in quantifying the contributions made to a patentable invention or a copyright work by multiple inventors or authors, and of course conflicting opinions amongst the co-owners regarding the best way to commercialise and/or otherwise exploit the IPR post-creation.

What You Will Learn

This short webinar will cover the following:

• How do co-ownership scenarios happen/arise for patents, copyright, designs and trade marks?
• How does co-ownership work for patents?
• What are the implied/statutory provisions on co-ownership of patents, copyright, designs and trade marks?
• Express contractual terms
• Advantages and disadvantages of relying on implied provisions for patents, copyright, designs and trade marks
• The implications for unitary patents and the Unified Patent Court
• General advantages and disadvantages of relying on implied provisions for IPR:
• Automatic entitlement and protection
• Statutory provisions mostly inadequate for commercial arrangements
• Advantages of using an express co-ownership agreement:
• Allows the parties to set out their preferred approach - may even be more appropriate for one party to take assignment of the IPR and then licence back to the now ex-co-owner
• Exploitation of the IPR - licensing, in-house manufacture and sale of protected products etc
• Prosecution and registration of the IPR where appropriate - i.e. patent application process, renewals, opposition proceedings
• Approach to defence and enforcement - i.e. third-party challenges to validity and third-party infringements
• Future development - i.e. further research using the protected invention in the case of patents