Some companies make money licensing patents, or suing for damages.

So the company pulled back from its elaborate plans and adopted a business model based on licensing patents to others.

A patent troll makes money off licensing patents without every making any actual products.

Currently, 55 companies are licensing patents for communications protocols and 42 of these would be required to pay royalties.

If you go to the Lodsys site you'll find a lot about licensing patents, but nothing about their products.

Mr. Bremer said such fears were causing universities to shy away from licensing patents to small companies.

The phrase "soft intellectual property" or Soft IP also refers to a system for licensing patents proposed in 2008.

It is a patent holding company formed by in 1992 by Thomas J. Campana and some investors with the intent of licensing patents.

This business model of non-practicing entities (NPEs) acquiring and licensing patents has been referred to as patent trolling.

As of February 2006, Rambus derived the majority of its annual revenue by licensing patents for chip interfaces to its customers.

Certainly Apple, and most companies like Apple, don't fall under this definition and the mere business model of licensing patents doesn't either, as long as one is upfront and above board about it.

Patentleft (also patent left, copyleft-style patent license) is the practice of licensing patents (especially biological patents) for royalty-free use, on the condition that adopters license related improvements they develop under the same terms.

Since there is apparently good money to be made from litigating over and hopefully licensing patents (even ones that should never have been granted in the first place), a number of specialty patent business have recently sprung up:

With the world gone wireless and Qualcomm producing lots of wireless tech (and licensing patents on a whole host of it), the company has become more influential, even if the public is still largely unaware of its significance.

Lawrence Gilbert, senior director of technology transfer for the California Institute of Technology, put it this way: "Universities earn fees and royalties from licensing patents, but the real benefit comes from contributions to the endowment if the start-up company is successful."

There is his quote in an interview with Forbes that "we want to build a portfolio just like those companies have, with licensing approaches broadly like they have ... I want to achieve what IBM has achieved [getting $1bn per year from licensing patents].

TAKING AIM AT GOOGLE - Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, is licensing patents and technology to a start-up with an ambitious goal: to build a search engine that could some day rival Google.