Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, your host of the Bold Today Show, where you, the inventor, entrepreneur, and business owner, get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. Thanks for joining, and this is part 4 of our “Make Your Goal Big” series. Think about your goal and let’s monetize patents about it. So your challenge of the day, as you’ve been hanging with us on this series, is not only to take that written goal that’s been fully fleshed out with the environment, and now you’ve got it drawn up. Okay, you’ve got it with color, it’s in life, and you can see it. What I want you to do today is to take it, get a color copy, print it out in a reasonable format you can see from most any distance. I want you to put it somewhere that you’re gonna see it every day. For most people that work on the computer, you’re gonna need to post this thing right on your monitor or put it into a frame close by your work area. You need to be reminded of this goal throughout the day. It’s not just up in the morning, think about your goals, and move on. You need to see this and think about it as you move through your day so that’s your challenge is to set this up so you can see it and feel it, understand what you’re working with, and you constantly, every decision you make, every big move you make, even throughout the day, you’re thinking about your goal.
Okay, we’re still in the world of patent monetization, and for this part of the Bold Today Show, I want to talk about the selling, my patent sale rights, selling a patent, and what that entails. So as opposed to licensing where you’re giving up just part of your four rights, a sale usually entails giving up all rights. Now, there actually are still some strings that can be attached. I want to talk about three different types of patent sales. So there is what’s called the absolute sale, and it’s what you think, all rights, no reservations, no strings attached, to sale of a patent, an application, or issued patent. So those are lump sum or that could be certainly could be payments over time, but that type of a sale is strictly contract law. There’s not much to think of in terms of rights to negotiate with; they’re all being given up in an absolute sale.
The most common types of sale is actually a sale with a license back to the inventor or the business that owns it. So what that means is with a license back is it allows the inventor or the business that has been assigned the invention the ability to continue using that invention. Sometimes it’s for just a research case so you can continue to develop that technology and use it in-house to build new versions of the next-level invention or choose to actually commercialize that based product. You’re allowing at least one other party via that sale to go out and do what they want in the market, but you’re reserving the right to do that on your own as you wish and we may want to in the future. So it’s usually included with most sales agreements is this license back to the inventor. And there’s a third sale called a license with a royalty. So while there’s no license back to the inventor, there’s royalty that they’re gonna get is just like it would be for a license agreement. It’s just a way to the person purchasing that patent doesn’t need to pay as much money upfront. They’re sort of using the market as a bargaining chip, and they’re saying, “Look, we’re gonna give you this amount of money down, but we’re not that sure about how this product that’s gonna do in the market. And so we’re only going to pay you as it sells in the marketplace.” So you get a royalty on the sales along with a bit of a lump sum payment. So it’s sort of a mixed bag sales approach.
There’s lots of ways to monetize patents, as you can see. We’ve already talked about going to the P tab, going through federal litigation, talked about licensing, and today we just talked about sales. So tomorrow we’re going to hear about how defensive publications can actually be an interesting way to monetize patents for your business. If you’ve learned anything on this today’s show or anything about you’d be interested in learning more about, know that we can speak with you. You can speak with one of our patent attorneys for 30 minutes, no cost to you. It’s a consultation; we want to get your questions answered. You can go schedule one of those on our website at boldIP.com. I’m your host J.D. Houvener of the Bold Today Show. It’s been a pleasure talking with you today, and I hope you all have a wonderful day. Go big, go bold.