Indemnification clauses play an important role in supplier – customer business relations. IP indemnification clauses have also been widely used in contracts across the supply chain, as well as between licensors and licensees.
However, indemnification clauses can quickly become messy, and relying too heavily on them can lead to contract disputes, liability and ultimately add costs.
In an era of convergence and massive IoT, a large number of stakeholders will be involved in often complex deployments like smart cities: industrial and consumer device manufacturers, telecom operators, network infrastructure providers, health care providers, hyperscalers, municipalities, citizens, and many more.
Making sense of IP indemnification clauses in such a complex web of players can become massively tricky. Historically, licensors have licensed at the device level, and indemnification clauses were often frowned upon. On the other hand, licensees have often claimed that indemnification by suppliers should cover IP licenses.
In a complex scenario, however, such indemnification may be limited and difficult to navigate. Moreover, the value of technology deployments is rapidly shifting away from devices and moving to the upper layers. Such value to citizens may be difficult to ascertain when government subsidies and private-public partnerships are instrumental for such deployments.
This panel will look at how IP indemnification clauses will need to evolve as IoT brings more complexity into the IP licensing ecosystem. And more fundamentally, is there a role at all for IP indemnification clauses in such complex scenarios?
