Yet for most physicians, the patent system is completely foreign. The confusion is mainly due to the great deal of misinformation online. One company will market patent services for $200, while another will ask for $20,000.
You may have heard of a friend or colleague that has licensed a patent to a manufacturer and made some money. How prevalent is this exactly? Is licensing a medical device patent simply like winning the lottery?
The answer may surprise you. In the United States, payments made to physicians from medical device manufacturers and drug companies are open to the public.
From an IP perspective, patents and published applications are now readily accessible from sites like Google Patents and others. Google Books allows the public to search millions of books in a matter of minutes to find relevant information.
A less loaded term is a Non-Practicing Entity (NPE). NPEs may include inventors who do not practice an invention, as well as firms who buy IP and offer it to larger companies for a fee. There is a lot of spilt ink on whether every NPE is a patent troll.