Interopera-what?

Strategic Factors Affecting Licensing Negotiations

Recently we looked at how a party's market role or position might affect the tone of a negotiation.   In this post we'll take a first look at a number of other strategic factors that can influence the shape of a licensing deal.    This is a very broad topic, so we will list these generally first.   In our next post, we will take a look at some industry examples.

For the sake of clarity, we'll assume below that you are doing the licensing. If you're a licensee, simply reverse the analysis.

Collaboration Conundrums

We know.   It's hard enough satisfying your own shareholders, let alone trying to satisfy someone else's. The thought of trying to get another enterprise to work with you on a long term development project involving multiple IP rights can be daunting.

But however difficult collaborations are, sometimes you can't afford to ignore the opportunities they present.  We can't give collaborations and collaboration licensing an exhaustive treatment in this post, but we thought we'd put pen to paper and give you a summary of some selected issues that need to be considered when putting together collaboration deals.

Web Scraping and Copyright

Technology develops faster than the law does.   This can have both good and bad results.  Take the practice of web-scraping, for instance.   The same type of software used to detail the content of your site for search engine results can also be used to rob you of your innovative content.   Instead of just syndicating the content to provide it for search results, the software can also ‘scrape up’ the content to be used somewhere else.

The logical legal tool to deal with web-scraping abuse is copyright.