The other 'L' word License. Let's accept reality and create a business solution. Lobby, Legislate, and Litigate are all approaches to our regulatory environment. However, they are not producing results leading us a manufactures to an environment where we can continue to innovate for our customers and comply with our regulators.
Licensing enables us to resolve today's issues, and move forward building products our customers love. However, the discovery of predicates to match our products is an arduous road. The FDA reporting system does not provide enough transparent information for us to locate predicates.
Under the current system every manufacturer will need to retain legal counsel to search for predicates and then license from the owners. How well will the negation go when the predicate owners knows you don’t have choices? Not well I expect.
An alternative approach for Licensing is pooling predicates and sharing them royalty-free. But how is this possible you may ask? Maturing Industries have often pooled intellectual property and collaborate to advance the everyone. Auto, Aviation, and Software all developed these pools of intellectual property. Additionally, they created associations to mange the curation of the intellectual property and to define the terms by which the members collaborate.
Our urgency with the Predicate Exchange is to form a body of Manufacturers who are committed to sharing their predicates with other members to benefit all through standard licenses and low or no royalties.
We don’t have all the answers today, but we do have a blueprint from others industries which we can follow. Now, let's get to work on our business solution!