Posts Tagged: "article one partners"

On Monday, March 7, 2011, Article One Partners announced that it had surpassed the $1 Million milestone and has now distributed over $1 million in reward money to Advisors. It would seem that Article One Partners is growing and thriving, and that my initial reaction to the Article One Partners business model was incorrect. In fact, Article One Partners is likely just scratching the surface of its potential and demonstrating the power of coordinated crowd sourcing solutions.

Article One Partners announced yesterday that patents held by NTP Incorporated are the focus of three new requests for research, which Article One Partners refers to as Patent Studies. NTP was made famous for its litigation against BlackBerry maker Research-in-Motion (RIM) that resulted in a settlement north of $600 million. New litigation by NTP has expanded the assertion of patent infringement to other top players in the mobile and smartphone industry, which is prompting Article One Partners to engage their global community of researchers by challenging them to identify evidence predating the patents in question and which can be used to invalidate one or more of the patent claims owned by NTP.

Whatever your opinion of the business model, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Cheryl Milone has turned Article One Partners a major player in the patent research field. Article One is attracting big name members to the Board of Directors, they have started a patent quality review blog and Milone was recently invited to the White House to participate in a round-table event, which she talks about in our conversation. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Cheryl Milone. We talk patent reform, reexamination, patent litigation, improved patent search and IT databases, claim construction and more.

NEW YORK, Feb. 8 /PRNewswire/ — Article One Partners, the world’s largest patent validation firm, today announced that Patrick W. Gross has joined its Board of Directors. Gross was an influential member of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s staff, has been the chairman, vice chairman, founder, co-founder and trustee of a large number of public service organizations, and a…

Former Head of Patents at Microsoft and IBM, Marshall Phelps, Appointed to Article One Partners Board of Directors New York — February 1, 2010 — Article One Partners, the world’s largest patent validation firm, today announced the appointment of Marshall Phelps to its Board of Directors. The Director position with Article One is Phelps’ first board involvement within the IP…

Article One Partners announced earlier today that two winners will share the $50,000 prize for discovering prior art in Article One’s Garmin/SP Technologies Patent Study.  The Study related to a graphical interface providing a touch screen keyboard display that may not be minimized, maximized, closed or deleted. In a 2008 complaint filed in federal court in Chicago, SP Technologies, LLC…

I do still believe that reexaminations are the way to go if companies are really interested in stopping patent trolls, and perhaps moving forward there will be a merger between the prior art found by Article One and attempts to get the Patent Office to review previously granted patents. In any event, according to USPTO statistics, 9.2% of requests for ex parte reexamination result in all claims being canceled and 59% of the time certificates issue with at least some claims being changed. Even more dramatic, 74% of requests for inter partes reexamination result in all claims being canceled and 14% of the time certificates issue with at least some claims being changed. The answer to dealing with patent trolls is to go after them with reexaminations, not to try and build a useless defensive patent portfolio.