The Licensing Executives Society publishes a triennial industry survey on royalty rates. The same survey reports a less-quoted statistic: roughly 35% of patent license agreements terminate before reaching their expected total royalty payment. Some terminate because...
A U.S. patent stops at the U.S. border. A Chinese factory can copy your invention, ship it to Germany, sell it to a French distributor, and your U.S. patent does nothing. The World Intellectual Property Organization processed 273,900 international patent applications...
The first ten manufacturers you pitch will pass. Possibly twenty. The pattern is so consistent that licensing professionals build it into project timelines: thirty pitches average, six serious conversations, two term sheets, one deal. A pass is not a verdict on the...
A 2023 study from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office estimated the total economic value of active U.S. patents at over $7 trillion. The median patent? Worth less than zero after maintenance fees. That gap, between trillion-dollar aggregate value and a median number...
About 30% of exclusive patent licenses include sublicensing rights. About 5% of inventors who grant those rights understand what they have given away. The gap between those two numbers is the most common reason an exclusive license that looks fine at signing produces...
The time from issued patent to first royalty cycle, for an independent inventor with a commercial product, often runs past a year. Most of that time goes to three things: finding the right targets, getting through the front door, and negotiating the agreement once you...
A typical patent license agreement runs 18 to 32 pages. About 60% of that document is boilerplate. The other 40% is where the money lives. Inventors who try to read all of it on their own usually catch the obvious problems and miss the ones that cost six figures...
A U.S. utility patent runs 20 years from its earliest non-provisional filing date. Most license agreements written against that patent run shorter. Many run only three to five years before the first renewal decision. The gap between those two clocks is where inventors...
The pitch you hear at trade shows and on inventor podcasts is that licensing is the low-cost path to commercial success. No factory, no inventory, no sales team. Sign a contract and collect royalties. The numbers tell a different story: $8,000 to $30,000 of...
The most common mistake an independent inventor makes in royalty negotiation is asking for too much. The second most common mistake is settling for too little. The middle band where deals close ranges from 2% to 10% of net sales for most product categories, and the...
