Newsletter ILP Vegetable - February 2016
More than one year ago the International Licensing Platform was incorporated, so the association celebrated its first anniversary. And looking back to this first year it can be concluded that this year was a successful year for the association and its members.
During the first General Meeting in December 2014 the Board was elected. The members of the board indicated that they wish to involve all the other members of ILP as much as possible in the activities of the board. In order to foster this involvement it was decided that the minutes of the board meetings will be available for all members of ILP and all members will have the opportunity to add items to the agenda and are invited to attend the board meeting for this specific item. In this way transparency is guaranteed as much as possible.
Also the 6 members of the Expert Committee were appointed during this first General Meeting. These highly qualified Expert Committee members have proven relevant competences and are selected on the basis of absolute independence and neutrality.
This Expert Committee has the important duty to make the decisions in arbitration cases (the so called ‘Baseball Procedure’).
Furthermore these experts have the task to determine the seed treatment costs. These costs are excluded from the net sales and these net sales are important in relation to payment of a royalty percentage. The Expert Committee has determined these seed treatment costs on base of all information, delivered by the members of ILP.
In this first year the ILP could welcome one new member, East West Seeds. Furthermore there were several requests for information about ILP Vegetable and membership of this association. So it can be expected that new members will enter into the association.
The members of the ILP Vegetable are proponents of transparency. Therefore it was decided to make all information, so all documents of the ILP, publicly available and these documents can be found on the website of ILP (www.ilp-vegetable.org).
It was also decided to publish the information of all committed patents of the members of ILP Vegetable. The Patent Register with all information about the committed patents in the ILP system can be found on the website.
Looking back on the first year the conclusion is that the ILP system works well. With the development of the ‘baseball procedure’ in case of arbitration, it was expected that only a few or even no arbitration cases should happen in this year. And indeed no arbitration cases did occur up to now. With regard to the variety patents in the USA , we have seen that the ILP has been used, which has increased open innovation. With regard to “trait patents” the ILP can in fact be considered as a safety net to get access to these patents and a way to stimulate patent holders to grant licenses to the other members at reasonable conditions.
ILP Vegetable received external recognition by several organisations whereby the arbitration system of ILP Vegetable is mentioned as a possible role model for establishment of FRAND licenses.
Looking to the future the ILP Vegetable expects a further expansion of membership of the association. Also the amount of committed patents in the ILP system is expected to grow continually.
An important activity of the board in 2016 will be the fine-tuning of some of the documents that will be decided upon by the General Meeting.