Posts Tagged: "Michael Gulliford"

Are you bullish or bearish on the 2018 patent market? That is the question I asked a panel of experts recently. For the most part, those industry insiders who responded are bullish, although some are cautiously bullish. As you will read below, there seems to be a consensus that activity will be up in terms of deals in 2018, but relief from the downward pressure on prices experienced over the last several years likely will not be forthcoming in 2018.

The clear consensus seems to be that the patent licensing market is not dead, but that the U.S. market is in decline and due to a weakening of patent rights capital will go elsewhere.

Finjan will issue 153,000 shares of Series A-1 Preferred Stock at a price of $100 per share to Soryn HLDR. In connection with this transaction, the company will also issue to Soryn HLDR warrants to purchase two million shares of common stock at an exercise price of $3.18 per common share. 

It’s this environment of malaise within which Yahoo is trying to bolster its fortunes with the sale of an intellectual property portfolio involving about 3,000 patents and patent applications which the company recently reassigned to a subsidiary known as Excalibur IP. Some of the patents in this portfolio date back to the company’s initial public offering in 1996 and news reports from The Wall Street Journal indicate that some expect the portfolio to fetch a price in excess of $1 billion… “If this sale had happened before Alice, the valuations would be multiples higher,” said Michael Gulliford of Soryn IP Group. Another factor mentioned by Kent Richardson (ROL Group) was the fact that the so-called smartphone patent wars have largely ended so the patents in related sectors are not as important from a defensive standpoint.

If you have any software patent that is essentially a software version of a human practice — something that was done in human practice — and you decide to write up a patent, even if you automated it in such a way and did things that the human brain could never do it will be problematic. If you can look at the patent and then make an argument that humans were doing this outside the software realm before you implemented it in software, under Alice, I think you’ve got a big problem.

They use early IPOs as an alternative to traditional venture funding. But one of the things that the investors place a huge importance on is a very sophisticated, robust patent operation. So whereas it used to be you’d have a new company and it could take years even to get some sort of sophistication, we’re now doing it on day one. And the results have been great to see. Over the last few months we have filed close to a hundred patent applications for these entities. We’re able to do that because we have been able to negotiate favorable deals with the law firms we use and we can pass that on to the clients. So our goal is to really be creating companies and crafting their portfolios from day one. Essentially, my partner and I work to insource a very sophisticated patent operation for a company that ordinarily wouldn’t have had that capability.