Intellectual property rights for new ventures

This course is an introduction to intellectual property rights, e.g. patent law and, to a lesser extent, to copyright and design rights as legal areas of prime importance to technological development. Trade secret protection is of course part of the course.
The legal regimes involved in intellectual property rights will be set out, followed by an introduction to the formal procedures that apply when protection of intellectual property is sought. Particular attention will be paid to trade secrets as an essential asset in the knowledge economy and in the context of the individual firm: what is a trade secret, and can it be protected from falling into the hands of competitors? Is it desirable, from a societal and economic point of view, that technological knowledge is monopolized through IPRs?
 
This course starts off with a set of lectures on patents, trade secrets, trademarks, copyright, and design rights. Here, we strive for a high level of awareness and understanding of the role and importance of IPRs. The second part of the course will then specifically focus on the perspective of the entrepreneur, focusing on protection of ideas, freedom to use, and the development of an appropriate IPR strategy paying particular attention to the case of startups.Students are shown how some companies can only survive if they position themselves properly in different legal environments, how innovation is positively and negatively affected by patents, how huge numbers of overlapping patents (‘patent thickets’) impact markets and how extremely aggressive patent strategies (patent trolls) threaten and sometimes kill their prey. It is shown how patents have developed far beyond their original role (providing a manufacturing monopoly) towards business assets necessary to obtain freedom to operate, to defend a company against competitors, and to strategically block other companies or extract money from them.
 

 
The knowledge gained will be applied throughout the course in a group assignment. In this assignment, a group of students takes the perspective of a new, entrepreneurial firm that has an original technological idea, and the group will then perform three tasks:

• Perform a patent search analysis related to the technological idea
• Investigate whether the idea has the potential to be patented and/or protected by other IPRs
• Design an IPR strategy for the firm that covers both the necessary freedom-to-operate (where necessary) and protection of its own ideas.

 
The course will be taught in English (including all course material)

Students that successfully finished this course should be able to:

• Classify and evaluate the different uses of IPRs as a tool for protecting innovative activities in different contextsand especially in the case of new ventures
• Apply the knowledge gained through the course to develop a viable IPR strategy  in the context of an innovative entrepreneurial venture and use various patent search approaches to identify relevant patents in the venture’s technological field, and to determine possible prior art.
• Identify the patent landscape in the relevant technical field, categorize the venture’s competitors, anddevelop a strategy for dealing with intellectual property owned by others (freedom-to-operate).
• ​Develop an optimal strategy to protect and capitalize on the know-how of the (prospective) venture.

You must meet the following requirements

• Registered for a degree programme other than
• HBO-TOP Applied Physics, Pre-Master
• Completed none of the course modules listed below
• Patents design rights & standards projec (0SAUC0)
• Patents design rights & standards (0SEUB0)
• Patents design rights & standards (0SSUC0)

• WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook: Policy, Law and Use, WIPO Publication No.489, Available at http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/iprm/index.html
• Additional readings will be communicated on Canvas