World one-stop patent licensing leader MPEG LA discussed its “many-to-many” licensing model, at a conference on Food Security last week, as providing for open licensing access to intellectual property owned by many parties on terms that make the benefits of innovation available to everyone. The #AccessIP conference, held in Geneva, Switzerland, was sponsored by Syngenta Corporation to explore the power of open intellectual property systems and collaborative innovation models to expand, and facilitate wide access to, new technologies for feeding the world’s population with sufficient, safe and nutritious food.

“Helping tackle critical challenges to advance the world’s most important goals is not beyond the reach of this licensing model,” said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn. "We created a new pro-competitive form of access to intellectual property rights that balances social benefit with incentives for patent owners, revolutionizing the way inventors and users think about intellectual property. What MPEG LA did to make emerging information technologies available to everyone, it is now doing with diagnostic tests for personalized medical solutions and can do for other technologies.”

In his presentation, Horn highlighted the role the MPEG LA^® Licensing Model played in enabling users to address the patent thicket around the MPEG-2 video compression standard. MPEG-2 became the most successful standard in consumer electronics history producing nearly $4 trillion in worldwide product sales, and the solution pioneered by MPEG LA became the template for making intellectual property rights around patent thickets available and affordable to everyone. Today MPEG LA manages licensing programs consisting of some 8,000 patents in 74 countries with more than 160 patent holders and nearly 6,000 licensees. MPEG LA’s most recent initiative is Librassay^®, a web-based store of biomarker and research tool patent rights from the world’s leading life sciences research institutions in support of tests and assays, kits, tools and instruments for genetic analysis, biomarker detection, medical diagnosis, research and drug discovery.

More information on the MPEG LA^® Licensing Model can be found at: http://www.mpegla.com, or by emailing: info@mpegla.com.