Patent Pooling Public Interest And Pharmaceutical Industries A Comparative Analysis Of Indian And US Patent Regimes

Abstract

Patent pool is an association of two or more companies to cross license their patents in respect to a particular technology. In other words this is an agreement between companies to license or permit one another or any third party to use the patents owned by them. quotThe aggregation of intellectual property rights which are the subject of cross-licensing, whether they are transferred directly by patentee to licensee or through some medium, such as a joint venture, set up specifically to administer the patent pool1quot Patent pools are basically originated as most of the technologies involve various patents and owners and it is impossible to adopt such technology without infringing any ones technology or without an effective means to obtain necessary license to use the various patents. Other reason for origination of patent pools was to avoid the competitors suing each other in order to keep out each other from the technology. Patent pools are generally created to use the technology of others without incurring any cost related to research and development. Patent pools also helps in reducing the cost of licensing patents, risk of infringing patents and saves time in research. The interest in the patent pool can be seen in the emerging industrial or electronic technologies, examples including airplanes, radios, MPEG-2 audio and video, etc. Patent pools recently have begun to be the subject of interest in the genomics or biotechnology community also.