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Hey there, it’s Gary Schuster with Innovation Cafe, and today I want to talk about efficient infringement.

What efficient infringement is, is when a company decides it would be cheaper to infringe on a patent than it would be to pay the licensing fee. Often this is because they look at the inventor and they go, “As a small inventor, they can’t afford to litigate. Even if we get caught infringing, we’re not going to have to pay much in terms of a licensing fee because they can’t afford lawyers to bring the lawsuit.” So they go ahead and infringe, taking the risk that they’ll be caught, knowing that they’ll still probably come out ahead financially when compared to simply licensing it.

That raises all kinds of ethical issues — serious ethical issues — and it does bring into question the viability of the entire patent system. If the system is designed in such a way that it is so slanted in favor of big companies that big companies can knowingly infringe and make money doing it, that’s a problem. Thanks for watching!