Posts Tagged: "patent value"

Patent Encumbrances Can Reduce Market Value up to 100 Percent

Patent broker Brad Close notes that encumbrances can have the effect of reducing a patent’s value by up to 100 percent, practically rendering a patent valueless on the market. “If the only companies which are potential targets for a license are already licensed, then the intellectual property is essentially worthless,” Close said. “If a startup is considering entering into an agreement that would place an encumbrance upon a patent, I would advise them to be very sure that what they’re receiving in return offers adequate value and to take into consideration both their investors and the future of the business,” Close said.

LOT Network surpasses 275 members, fighting PAE patent litigation

LOT Network markets itself as a non-profit consortium, which offers its members a legal mechanism affording them protection from patent assertion entities (PAEs) and immunizes its members against patent suits from non-operating entities for about 1.2 million worldwide patent assets currently owned by LOT members… The LOT Network conditional license only applies to patents that are in network at the time that a firm joins the consortium. If a business joins LOT after a LOT member sells a patent, previous LOT members are protected by the conditional license whereas the new member still faces the potential of an infringement suit down the road on that patent.

Creating Better Applications Through Patent Strengthening

Events along the prosecution process create multiple windows of opportunity for strengthening a portfolio. Decisions are based on indications of market adoption using evidence from specialized technical analysis and subject matter experts who examine products in the market that potentially use your teaching and proposed claims. There are four key factors to consider during the prosecution process that can identify strengthening opportunities

Patent Valuation, Discount Rates and the Global IP Index

Suppose you are valuing a large patent portfolio with issued patents and pending applications in more than 20 countries throughout the world. One of your tasks would be to project how much royalties each patent could collect in each of the subject countries over time. After plotting out your expected revenue streams, you would have to apply a discount rate to these projected royalty revenue streams to reflect the risks associated with entering into governing licensing agreements. Which risks are embodied in discount rates (also known as costs of capital)?

So, What’s the Value of Your Patent Strategy? Getting from Assumptions to Numbers

10,000+ patents, spending $10M’s per year, cross-licenses, and license potential with dozens of companies, what’s the value of the portfolio to the business? Is your patent strategy valuable to your company? How? OK, tag you are it, what is the answer? The problem seems intractable. In previous articles, we have discussed how to determine your general patent risk and how to put a number on it. But where do you start when you are trying to estimate the value of your patent strategy?

What’s the Price of Your Patent?

Richardson Oliver Insights launches a suite of data and analytics solutions providing patent buyers, sellers, and executives access to patent market data covering over 120,000 patent assets and nearly 5,000 deals. The data spans hundreds of technologies and market sectors including smartphones, wireless communications, cloud computing, social networking, OLED displays, and semiconductors.

AST acquires 70 patent assets in fixed price, fixed term buying program

AST, a provider of proactive patent risk mitigation solutions, recently announced the results from IP3 2017, a fixed price, fixed term, collaborative patent buying program. Launched this past August, IP3 2017 gave sellers an easy way to access the secondary market by streamlining the process of selling patents with a fixed price, rapid response model. Through IP3 2017 patent sellers…

Unlocking the Value in Software Patents

Alice has had an impact on software patents, but they still hold significant value. If your portfolio includes software patents, there will be times when you want to extract value from that portion of your portfolio. As with any patent, there are three key criteria that must be applied when determining value: is it being used, is its use economically significant, and can that use be proven. Join Gene Quinn for a discussion about how to unlock the value of software patents in light of Alice.

Strengthening Patent Value Throughout the Patent Prosecution Flow

Patents allow you to protect your inventions, license the use of the inventions of others, and introduce additional revenue streams to your business. Patents also require investments of time and money to maximize their usefulness. By focusing your investment and efforts on optimizing the usability of patents of value, you can improve the validation that your applications read on markets of interest, and that further your portfolio goals, help tune a patent portfolio by developing indication of use (IoU) of some applications regarding products of interest, and early cost savings by avoiding applications with challenges or concerns, use applications as soon as they are granted and improve utilization of filed inventions by identifying continuation opportunities… There are many ways that patent strengthening can improve a portfolio. By focusing on optimizing the quality of patents of value you can achieve maximum ROI from their use, and you can minimize the cost by avoiding lower-value applications as well as their future maintenance.

Tax Reform to Revive the American Innovation Culture

The U.S. patent promise of exclusivity has become nothing more than lip service with no credibility for more than half a century. A patent system maintained by offering lip service must fail over time. The American inventor population is vanishing rapidly as a result of the changed laws and anti-patent movement. If the patent reward fails, both those who are inventors and those who would be inventors will be influenced not to pursue innovating and society will see an era of slow progress. Bad policy advice has misled Congress into belief that inventing without the participation of inventors will be fine. Reality will soon prove it was a fatal mistake that the U.S. should not have made.

Oil States: Examining Scenarios, Outline Effects on Portfolio Management Strategy

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a petition for Certiorari in Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, which will result in the Court addressing the constitutionality of post grant proceedings… The impact of the resulting decision in this case may affect patent dispute outcomes not just moving forward, but possibly spanning 5 years into the past… At a (very) high level, there are three possible outcomes arising from the Supreme Court decision that is expected in 2018 that will impact the IPR process: no change, some change, major change.

A patent without enforcement value has no licensing value

Enforcement of patents through litigation occurs when licensing has failed to result in an arms length negotiated resolution. In other words, patent owners resort to litigation when there is a market failure… When Keller says that the value of a patent is inextricably tied to the value obtainable through litigation that is just an economic truism. If the patent has no value when enforced in litigation, whether because the subject matter of the innovation has become patent ineligible, or because of a bias that tends toward finding practically everything obvious, the patent has no enforcement value. These litigation realities spill over into the business dealings because a patent that has no enforcement value will have necessarily have no licensing value.

The PTAB’s dramatic effect on patent value and corresponding disincentives to capital allocation

Whether one celebrates or decries the PTAB, there can be little doubt that it has worked a profound effect on the value of American patents—and, concomitantly, on incentives to invest in research and development… Compared to their judicial counterparts, PTAB judges are biased in favor of invalidity. Personnel differences also explain a more disturbing phenomenon, mainly, that the Patent and Trademark Office seems to be at war with itself. Frequently, the PTAB invalidates claims based on prior art that examiners considered during initial prosecution. The only explanation for such discordant outcomes is that PTO examiners take a more pro-patent view of validity than the judges who make up the PTAB.

A Repeatable Approach To Portfolio Monetization

To successfully monetize a patent portfolio, it is incredibly important to identify value within it, and to put in the work to prove to third parties and potential partners that that value exists… With the data-driven part of the mining exercise complete, the appropriate subset of patents can be turned over to the SMEs for evaluation of patent strength and enforceability. SMEs know the technology of a given field, they understand how technology has been implemented across multiple players in a given market, and they can reach a truly informed understanding about whether or not a given patent claim is being used in end product, whether or not that use can be detected, and what issues may be encountered in detection.

From underwater storage to drones, what is Amazon’s patent strategy?

At first sight Amazon´s patent portfolio is indeed remarkable, with respect to its total value as well as its development over time: the total value of the company’s patent portfolio shows a strong over-proportional growth within the past six years. Starting 2010 with about 550 patent families and € 130m, the patents have reached a total value in September 2016 an impressive total sum of € 1,15b with 4,162 alive patent families. For a company being recognized as a retailer this is indeed remarkable and shows the trend of being more and more a high tech company. This can be seen within their strong increase of total patent portfolio value but also the technical analysis.