Posts Tagged: "article one partners"

Article One Partners has just reached the $3 million milestone, having given out over $3 million to its cadre of researchers. Currently the total sum awarded by Article One is at $3,049,000 and counting, with some $64,000 being awarded to the winners of closed Studies on August 24, 2012. Some current Studies now carry a $10,000 Reward compared with the more usual $5,000 Reward.

J. Posner also brought the value of the patents declared to be essential under standards bodies to bear on the damages question.  Essential patents must be evaluated for absolute value and relative value to the full-declared portfolio.  These values are needed where a non-linear function is proposed for a royalty determination based on infringement of a subset of the declared patents.  The difficulty presented by an assertion of a single essential patent from a much larger portfolio is “that if [the potential licensee] had wanted to license any of the patents in [the standard’s essential portfolio], the license fee would have exceeded the product of the percentage of the portfolio represented by the patent and the value of the entire portfolio.”  Objective data to present a non-linear function was needed, and even where presented, the notion of a FRAND royalty applied to “confine the patentee’s royalty demand to the value conferred by the patent itself as distinct from the additional value – the hold-up value – conferred by the patent’s being designated as standards essential.”

Article One Partners always has interesting patent studies going on at any particular time, but one of their studies recently caught my eye in particular. There is an ongoing patent study relating U.S. Patent No. 7,076,445, titled “System and methods for obtaining advantages and transacting the same in a computer gaming environment.” A system for obtaining an advantage in a computer game? Sounds like just the type of competitive advantage that I ought to know about so I can beat my son. Now don’t get me wrong. I can kick his butt on Madden 2012 (or any other version of Madden), but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a completely different story! I guess I should just be thankful that he plays Call of Duty non-stop during the summer and isn’t practicing up on Madden!

Article One Partners, or AOP for short, is the world’s largest patent research community. Yesterday the company announced a partnership with Sony Corporation. AOP is supporting Sony’s defense against the rising trend in patent disputes with non-practicing entities (NPEs). “We have chosen to expand our prior art research capabilities with Article One Partners and their global community of researchers,” said Fumihiko Moriya, VP, Sr. General Manager, IP Alliance & Licensing Dept., IP Division, Sony Corporation. “Our partnership with Article One enables Sony to identify highly relevant prior art to help defend against an increasing number of low-quality patent assertions.”

If you mix water fun with amusement park your mind wanders towards a water park no doubt. But did you know that there is patented technology in some of those water parks across the United States? The ‘537 patent relates to an annular-shaped waterslide bowl for use as an element of a waterslide. The bowl serves to slow a rider down and bring him or her to a stop at the end of the waterslide ride. The bowl has a wall with a rider entry port through which a rider slides from a flume into the bowl. The bottom wall of the bowl has an opening at its center and a low circumferential wall around the opening extends upwardly from the bottom wall. The rider comes to a stop in the bowl and can step over the circumferential wall into the opening. A staircase located within the opening provides means for the rider to exit the bowl. The waterslide bowl provides a compact structure for slowing and stopping the rider and is particularly suitable for waterslide installations having limited space.

Article One Partners, the world’s largest patent research community, has several interesting patent search projects ongoing at the moment. But there is no doubt that looking for prior art can be a little like looking for a needle in a haystack. The Article One approach, therefore, is to tap into a global community of researchers.

The other reason AOP has been so success is also eluded to in Phelps’ quote above as well. Article One runs a “human network.” When I asked Cheryl what made Article One so successful she immediately responded “our researchers.” Indeed, their researchers are what makes the system work, and they have well over 1 million people registered as researchers and well over 23,000 active researchers who routinely submit prior art. These researchers are located all across the world, with roughly one-thrid in the United States, roughly another one-third in Europe, about 10% in Japan and the rest spread elsewhere around the globe. In addition to this geographic diversity, nearly 50% of researchers hold advanced degrees.

As a result of this announcement today, AOP will help Appsterdam accomplish the organizations mandate of supporting ongoing innovation and business success in the mobile app development community through research projects sent to its global, diverse and highly educated community. The Appsterdam Foundation attorneys and developers will work with AOP to conduct patent research, harnessing the global reach of the AOP community, which has been used by many Fortune 500 companies to locate prior art that can be used against patents asserted against them. While note every search conducted by Article One results in prior art that can be used to invalidate patent claims, many searches have found prior art that is then used in both federal court and at the United States Patent and Trademark Office during reexamination proceedings.

Vanderheyden joins AOP from the legal software and solutions corporation LexisNexis, where he was Vice President and Managing Director, Global IP Solutions. While at LexisNexis, he helped to develop TotalPatent, a leading patent research tool supported by the world’s largest patent database, and PatentOptimizer, a software tool that conducts word-level analysis of the legal integrity of a patent or application. Prior to LexisNexis, Vanderheyden served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for IP.com, a global patent and non-patent literature database, where he re-established the corporate brand, launched new products, and developed a patent for a new market opportunity. Vanderheyden held previous positions at IBM and founded Delphion, the first to make US patents searchable on the web.

Attendees agreed that it’s critical for companies to gain greater leverage to deter nuisance lawsuits and manage costs by reducing the cost of litigation defense. According to those surveyed this is accomplished, at least in part, through the use of joint defense groups (JDGs), where parties engage in shared co-counsel to reduce defense costs. JDGs have been used in approximately two-thirds of all NPE cases, and three-quarters of those surveyed reported working in some capacity with JDGs.

Article One Partners (AOP), the world’s largest patent research community, earlier today announced that the company has achieved a significant milestone — more than $2 million dollars in financial incentives to its global research community. This milestone comes 11 months to the day from when Article One announced that they had reached the $1 million award milestone.

The question may arise – what if the result of crowdsourcing is less than the proverbial “smoking gun,” can it place the App Developers at a disadvantage in court? Case law indicates that the answer is no. Last year, in a patent litigation brought by Personal Audio LLC, the plaintiff attempted to argue that their patent was valid based on crowdsourced research and to seek discovery on this basis. Personal Audio lost on both counts, with federal Judge Miriam Cedarbaum concluding, “eliminating a negative doesn’t show validity” and commenting on the patent owner’s approach with the statement “that’s what I call desperation.” Transcript of Oral Argument and Decision at 12-13 and 14, Personal Audio LLC v. Sirius XM Radio, Inc. et al, No. M8-85 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 2, 2010).

The search for innovative ideas has never been easy, but the advent of crowdsourcing technologies and powerful players willing to embrace new methodologies seems to be paying dividends. Rather than rely on traditional innovation that comes from one individual or a small group of individuals or those working for or with a single entity or as part of a joint venture, crowdsourcing technologies take problems to millions of people and capture the most creative solutions, allowing them to be pursued and developed. “Opening up the conversation and searching for solutions among a broad, but qualified, audience has allowed us to find unique, innovative ideas in a short period of time,” said Matthew Bishop, U.S. business editor and New York bureau chief for The Economist.

On Thursday, July 21, 2011, attorneys for Lodsys LLC, who is rapidly becoming a reviled patent troll, filed an amended complaint in the United States Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. As a result of this amended complaint some big names in the gaming world have been brought into the ongoing patent litigation battles being waged by Lodsys, who has already suing a number of Apple App developers and others such as Best Buy and the New York Times, see here and here. More specifically, as a result of the filing of this latest complaint Lodsys has brought patent infringement charges against Atari Interactive, Inc. and Electronic Arts, Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS), among others. But in the mind of the general public the highest profile defendant to date is no doubt Rovio Mobile Ltd., the maker of the extraordinarily popular game Angry Birds, which is available for iPhone, iPad and Android, among other platforms.

Article One Partners is at it again, this time with four patents in the cross-hairs owned by the company suing Apple App Developers for patent infringement — Lodsys. Article One Partners has made a name for itself as the premiere crowd sourcing, prior art locating company in the world. Now they have three different studies aimed squarely at the four Lodsys patents, which were just used earlier this week to sue the New York Times and others, and earlier still against Best Buy, Adidas, CVS and others. Indeed, it seems that Lodsys is becoming quite a nuisance for defendants, which places them at or near the top of the patent troll most wanted.