“Patent utilization” has been a buzz word in Japanese IP industry. There seems to be an increasing number of companies thinking that they should make effective use of patents that haven’t been used by themselves; i.e. monetize such patents by selling or licensing them to others. Actually, a client of ours has asked me what salable or licensable patents are like. First of all, you may need to know when a patent transaction occurs. One is when a company has to use a patent. In other words, it is the case that the company possibly infringes someone’s patent. We may be able to call this case an assertion-based transaction, since […]

Japanese largest musical copyright administration society JASRAC reached an agreement with a movie theater group on September 6 2018 that, for foreign films which will be released from November 2018 to March 2021, JASRAC will collect 6-level of music royalty of JPY 150,000 (approx. USD 1,350) to JPY 300,000 (approx. USD 2,700) in accordance with the number of screens. Currently, JASRAC is collecting JPY 180,000 (approx. USD 1,600) per film work. Reportedly, JASRAC is calculating on increased revenue by 15% to 20% by this agreement. For Japanese films, JASRAC is collecting the royalty for each of the musics in accordance with the number of screens, which is different from the […]

I attended a trading show specializing in character and brand licensing, Licensing Japan, which was held in Tokyo on April 4th to 6th 2018. Japanese people of all ages love characters of TV animations, movies, games and the like. It’s said that some people seek healing through such characters. The market size of Japanese domestic character goods is around 1.6 trillion JPY (approximately 16 billion dollars). In the Japanese market, Japan-origin characters such as pikachu and precure are strong, as expected, but recently the ratio of overseas characters is getting bigger. In character licensing, in many cases, a company who wish to develop its products using a particular character applies for a […]

After having posted the article regarding the intellectual property business matching model, we received inquiries on the model. So, we would like to explain it in a little more detail here, based on the material we received from a local government. It’s called “Kawasaki model” in Japan, because Kawasaki-City started a project under this model as a pioneer in 2007 to revitalize local industry while involving large companies successfully, and attracted attention from other local governments. The basic concept of this model is patented technology transfer from large companies to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It could be a win-win solution for both large companies and SMEs. Large companies desire […]

On February 7 2018, Fuji Xerox announced that it will roll out the patent licensing business to SMEs. In Japan, a business model for large companies to license their unused patents to SMEs to help such SMEs develop new products or create new business is getting a lot attention lately. Fuji Xerox has been participating in intellectual property business matching between SMEs and large companies since 2016 which is a local government project. Now it has signed a patent license agreement with a company in Yokohama, and made this announcement. This is the first success case in the IP business matching for Fuji Xerox. This business model brings the following […]