Patent Pool As A Tool To Tackle COVID-19 Pandemic

Do patent pools facilitate innovation or strangle it? One must evaluate pros and cons before creating or entering patent pools so that one can minimize risks and obtain benefits. How could it benefit in amidst the pandemic COVID-19?

No wonder, innovation steers today's world. In many instances, several enterprises develop technologies that end up overlapping in various aspects. In scenarios like these, possibilities of one technology to infringe on other technologies is well likely to arise. To address this, patent pools were created. According to WIPO, patent pool is defined as "agreement between multiple patent owners for licensing their patents to one another or any other third party for the purpose of sharing their intellectual property rights." In the absence of a patent pool (FIG. 1), each of the licensee must negotiate with all the patent owners for obtaining license, which is time consuming and expensive process. Contrastingly, in the presence (FIG. 2),