What An Engineer Needs to Know About Patent Laws? I: Background
Intellectual Property Values On August 9, 2000, CNN Money reported, a U.S. appeals court set a sooner-than-expected end to Eli Lilly and Co.'s reign as the sole marketer of Prozac, the popular antidepressant drug, a development that sent the pharmaceutical company's stock down by more than 30%. [“ Eli Lilly gets Prozac blues “, CNN ] It is about $36 billion in Lilly stock value, roughly a third of the pharmaceutical giant’s then market capitalization. On June 7, 2002, New York Times reported that royalties from inventions earn an estimated $150 billion/year worldwide and are expected to grow 30% annually over the next 5 years. [“ Trying to Cash in on Patents ”, New York Times] From 1993 to 2003, IBM alone was reported to earn well over $10 Billion in revenue from licensing out its patents and be awarded over 22,000 patents, more than the 10 largest U.S. IT companies combined, including Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and Apple. Meanwhile, Microsoft was reported to spend about $8