Posts Tagged: "defensive patent portfolio"

Using Anonymous Third-Party Submissions to Advance Your Business Goals

A decent patent strategy starts with protecting your current commercial product.  A better patent strategy builds on this by not only considering what is, but what could be.  To provide real value, consider the actions of others and invest time studying the patent landscape and gathering business intelligence from competitors’ filings.  Additionally, instead of passively observing such filings, a company should also consider being more active by filing one or more third-party submissions (often termed preissuance submissions) in their competitor’s pending applications.  These third-party submissions are a terrific defensive tool to slow down or impede your competitors’ patent ambitions.

You Need Defensive Patents But You Don’t Have Any. Now What? A Case Study

When the corporate asserter arrived at our client’s door, the asserter wanted: (1) to obtain both a cross-license and revenue from a patent license and (2) to increase our client’s purchases of the asserter’s products. Our client had virtually no patents of its own. To shift the negotiation, the decision was made to purchase defensive patents (counter-assertion patents). The reasons were that invalidating the asserter’s 10,000+ patents would be expensive and would take too long. Also, putting revenue from the asserter’s products and services at risk would change the dynamic of the negotiations to our client’s benefit.