특허전문관리회사(NPE)의 현황과 국내기업의 대응방안

Abstract

After patent troll first emerged in Korean newspaper, it became a phenomenon in Korean society. While there has been many papers on the NPE(patent troll), they rarely discuss their specific business model and their characteristics, which can be used for Korean global companies. NPE, Non-Practicing Entity is an corporation that makes profit through enforcing its patent rights without producing products from the patents. Its advent came from the U.S. patent and litigation system, that is advantageous to patent owner, like discovery, injunction, damage, venue shopping. Also, contingency free-based agreement encouraged NPE to litigate even baseless claim because it costed almost nothing even after losing the lawsuit. With the news that Korean companies suffered astronomical damage from patent infringement lawsuits from NPE, NPE came to arouse deep concern in Korea. NPEs have various business models. They includes the followings: Enforcing patent rights after building patent portfolio with R&D or patent aggregation; Defensive model against such aggressive NPE; financial firms that lend loans to NPE; IP broker; Asset management firm; IP-based transaction firm. While NPE came to be regarded as an independent business model, the concept of monetizing IP has attracted attention from many companies. To build a groundwork to analyse further NPE business models, this paper inquired typical NPEs from the models. They includes Intellectual Venture of aggressive NPE, SPH America and Blue Stone Innovation from Korean capital, RPX, AST, OIN from defensive NPE, Invention Capital with Korean NPE business model. With the trend of monetizing IP, NPE should be regarded as an accepted business model, which means that Korean companies should proactively use NPEs to maximize their profits. This means that companies should use NPE to depend companies from unexpected patent litigation and to enforce their patents for harvesting their investment. Now, it is time to think about how to use NPE to meet Korean companies' interests. Korean IP policy makers, therefore, need to make up one's policies to utilize and nourish such NPE models.