Posts Tagged: "Allied Security Trust"

The Brokered Patent Market Grows To $353 Million In 2018

Two years ago, we told the story of a patent broker who said: “This market keeps on getting worse; the case law keeps on coming out against patent owners; the prices keep dropping. This job keeps getting harder.”  We replied: “Our data says that you did pretty well last year.” “Right,” the broker conceded. “Last year was our best year ever …” This is truer now than ever before. Many of the metrics by which we analyze the patent market have been focused on the price of a single patent, a patent family, or even a group of patents in a package. But this leaves out a key market statistic: volume. As the market matures, we see: prices stabilizing across listings, buying and selling programs becoming more streamlined, and more transactions overall. The market is up, with more sales and more participants than ever before. While average asking prices dropped again, this drop was mostly due to single-asset prices normalizing to the pricing of the rest of the market. Meanwhile, listings, sales, and dollars transacted have all increased. The market continues to grow.

Defensive Patent Pools: There are Surprisingly Few Options

Unlike NPEs, defensive patent pools entities do not (at least initially) seek to generate revenues. Rather, they charge admission fees into the pool to fund IP acquisitions and the administrative costs to operate the pool. In sum, defensive patent pool aggregation is analogous to an insurance policy. But, where classic insurance lowers a company’s costs when accidents happen, patent pools are designed to reduce the likelihood of accidents (i.e., being sued for patent infringement) from happening at all.