Although, as JM Smucker learned, you still cannot patent a sandwich.
The list is actually probably a bit skewed. It takes into acount license contracts that are not conducted at arms length, for example contracts where subsidiary A grants a license to parent company A in return for royalties of 0% (hey they own our ass, we aren’t going to charge them for anything). Similarly, it takes into account contracts that have artifically high royalty rates, for one reason or another. So, pay less attention to the lower brackets (0-2%) and the higher brackets (above 10%), than you would the other figures.
The valuation of IP and construction of licenses is a very complicated area, and raw figures don’t give us such a great guide as to what is happening in reality. license fees are heavily dependant on all sorts of outside factors, such as initial payments, milestones, market conditions, exclusivity, and 100 other things.
Inventive step (non-obviousness) is a requirement and a bit different from novelty. I think most people would be surprised if they knew just how low the threshold of inventive step is though. I have a patent in front of me which contains an inventive step in that instead of using 3 batteries to control 6 widgets, it uses 6 batteries, in two groups of three, to control 6 widgets.
It’s a pretty low threshold. 
:smack:
How did that come about? Was there some philosophical justification behind it? Deliberation of patent clerks? The exertion of force by corporations?
I mean how, rationally, does the concept of patents get reduced to such a formulation?
The patent office is not tasked with or capable of determining the validity of all patents. Mostly they check to see if the exact same thing is already patented, see if it clears a few low hurdles, and then approve it.
Thus, the bar to get a patent is in fact pretty low. This does not mean that the patent is worth anything. If the patent is silly, such as for a sandwich, the first time the holder tries to enforce that patent, he will be in court defending it, and will probably lose.
This might seem to be an inefficient process to many, but imagine first the costs of maintaining/contracting for a staff of experts who understand EVERY discipline, conducting intense searches, and then making a decision, with the inevitable appeals from both Amazon.coms and Joe Garages with endless time. This is all paid for by your tax dollars.
Having the courts enforce patents acts as a gatekeeper function – if the patent is lame or pointless or worthless, the holder won’t sue to enforce. No one will infringe a worthless patent. So in the end, only valuable and arguably good patents will end up being enforced by the government. There will of course be a few bad decisions, but for the most part the system in place works well to minimize the number of frivolous cases.
ivn1188’s answer is pretty much on the money. But also, if you look around at all the factors invloved, they are almost all pressures to make it easier to get patents. For example, employees for large corporations whose salary or chance of promotion depend on how many patents they get granted per year, rich corporations who have developed strategies to scattergun patent applications across the board and try to push them all through in order to dominate one sector, lawyers who are paid well to push even the most undeserving patent application through to registration, overworked and sometime inexperienced patent office staff who have to go up against these fierce lawyers. The whole setup is a confluence of factors that can only lead to one result.
If you want to use that “CD in a box” logo, then you have to pay a license fee. That’s a trademark and trademarks don’t expire unless abandoned or some such.
(Whatever you do, don’t buy a CD that doesn’t have the logo. That’s pretty much a guarantee that the CD has copy protection software on it that could do bad things.)
I think, more specifically, it is covered in the laws of agency. These guys are hired to do work for somebody, and the fruits of the labor go to the ones that pay for it. Novel concept.