Lex Mundi commercialisation survey published

Lex Mundi's Survey on Trends for Commercializing IP: a Lex Mundi Multi-Jurisdictional Survey prepared by the Lex Mundi Intellectual Property Practice Group, current to February 2008, is featured by its compiler, Scottish firm Maclay Murry & Spens, in that firm's current In The Know newsletter. It's 132 pages long and, with no internal links, a difficult document to handle online.

The report lists first the questions posed, then the answers, and there's a handy glossary at the end. It covers more than 50 jurisdictions (including some US states and Canadian provinces). According to the Background:

"Despite the general drive towards harmonization of intellectual property laws on a worldwide scale, there remain distinct jurisdictional differences of which every practitioner should be aware. Given the nature of global commercialization and licensing trends, such awareness is becoming increasingly important.

In order to highlight and explore areas where these differences remain, the IP Practice Group thought it would be interesting and worthwhile to survey the membership of the Lex Mundi on trends for commercializing IP in their jurisdiction.
The survey was drawn up by the leadership group of the IP Practice Group and dispatched to all members of the IP Practice Group. The intention was for the survey to concentrate on particular aspects of commercialization and licensing to determine the degree of uniformity (or not) across members’ jurisdictions. ... The level of response was very positive with a large number of different jurisdictions providing responses.

... The results of the survey are not intended to represent a comprehensive guide to intellectual property law in each ... jurisdiction, but rather provide an insight into the differing trends for commercializing IP. ...".

The survey, which includes issues such as royalty payments and remittance of licence fees, uses the term 'trends' in the sense of 'global generalities drawn from aggregated specific instances' rather than in any temporal sense, since there is no attempt to describe how commercialisation is changing over a period of time -- but that sort of information is often difficult to obtain, particularly from law firms that are more likely to be executing their clients' instructions than telling them how to commercialise their IP.