Posts Tagged: "LinkedIn"

Facebook’s Efficient Infringement of Social Media Platforms Continues to Impact Snap Shareholders

Snap has attempted to remain competitive with new features, such as increasing the allotted time for video capture and introducing new drawing tools this May. But it hasn’t been able to gain a foothold against Facebook, a company which reportedly offered to buy Snap for $3 billion prior to Snap’s IPO… “If we are unable to protect our intellectual property, the value of our brand and other intangible assets may be diminished, and our business may be seriously harmed,” one of the section titles in Snap’s S-1 filing reads. Of course, in the current IP landscape, there is no real ability to protect that property, especially where it pertains to patents. And Facebook’s copying of features which are valuable on the Snapchat platform has been blatant.

Ensuring a robust defensive portfolio: A Prepared Counter-Assertion Strategy

The required number of patents in a given playbook varies based on both the size of company of concern and our exposure to it. The general goal of a playbook is to shift the licensing amount purportedly owed by LinkedIn by $20 million to $200 million in our favor. In order to achieve this, we have found that a good playbook should contain between three and 10 patent families, with evidence of use for key patents. The goal of each playbook is to show infringement by the asserter’s products and services exceeding $1 billion revenue. We set specific goals for each one and tested its contents against them.

Assertion Risk Mitigation Opportunity Through Patent Acquisition

In this post, we’ll analyze LinkedIn’s patent acquisition process and the results of its targeted buying program. While the increase in LinkedIn’s filings helped to grow the total patent portfolio, challenges remain. First, while organic filings tend to focus on LinkedIn’s core technology and therefore help a great deal with counter-assertion against potential competitors, they are less helpful when it comes to large corporate asserters further outside LinkedIn’s core technology area. Second, the priority dates on all the new filings are recent (after 2011). Earlier priority dates (old inventions) help the most in counter-assertion, but LinkedIn would have had to file for those patents in the 2000s. Fortunately, the market for buying and selling patents is robust and allows companies to fill in where they have weakness in their portfolios. Focused patent buying allowed us to build a counter-assertion portfolio to help bolster any negotiations.

LinkedIn’s Patent Strategy

LinkedIn was a rapidly growing company with only 22 patents in its portfolio in 2012, putting itself at high risk for patent assertion. With a revenue reaching nearly $1 billion and a growth of 86%, LinkedIn knew it had to develop a patent strategy to reduce its risk profile. So what was LinkedIn’s patent strategy and how did it increase its patent filings? Let’s start at the beginning… The opportunities for risk mitigation can be divided into two categories: increasing organic filings to address future assertion risk and patent acquisition to address present and near future risk.

How and Why LinkedIn Learned to Love Patents

In 2012, LinkedIn found itself a potential target for corporate patent asserters. LinkedIn had revenue reaching nearly $1 billion, with growth of 86%, yet owned only 22 patents. However, this changed fundamentally from 2012 to mid-2016, when LinkedIn grew its organic portfolio from 36 to over 1,000 patent assets and purchased more than 900, dramatically reducing its risk profile.