Posts Tagged: "patent market"

The patent market had an amazing bull run from the late 1980’s through 2012. The peak was 2011 to 2012 when we saw a number of multi-billion dollar patent sales and patent-driven acquisitions. The patent market started slowing down substantially shortly thereafter. Many blame the America Invents Act (AIA), which introduced a variety of ways to inexpensively challenge the validity of patents in administrative proceedings at the patent office. All of a sudden the confidence that once a patent was issued it was valid was shaken. However, the AIA was only part of the problem.

Patent damages generally, and enhanced damages specifically, are a patent political powder keg because there are so many corporations that are users of technology. These technology using, or technology usurping, corporations would rather not have to worry about the consequences of infringing patents. This has caused the so-called infringer lobby to put a premium on the issue of damages, specifically advocating positions that would minimize patent damages. Indeed, the infringer lobby has done an excellent job weakening patent rights and impairing the enforceability of patents over the last decade, both in the federal courts and on Capitol Hill. The Supreme Court has even several times mentioned the patent troll problem without the issue being before the Court and neither party being accused of being a troll.

After a 13% decrease in patent litigation in 2014, we are currently back to the same level of activity that we saw historically, with 2015 shaping up to have an average of circa 5000 new cases. Now the REALLY interesting data point is that most cases (roughly 70%) were brought this year by an operating company… Although the pendulum has by no way stopped its course and there are still many forces at work that wish to push it to swing even further, its momentum has definitely slowed.

If patents are so bad and Google has to spend so much money lobbying to weaken the patent system, why is the company simultaneously buying patents and racing to quickly patent their own original innovation? There seems to be a disconnect between what Google says and what they do. Could it be possible that Google has taken such strong anti-patent positions in an attempt to drive down the market for software patents so they can continue to collect patents at steep discount? That would be quite troubling, but there is no question that as Google rhetoric against the patent system has increased so to has their taste for patents

There seems to be a popular belief that the market for patents is dead, but if you look at recent transactions through Q1 of 2015, there are at least some signs that the patent marketplace is becoming more active. There have been a number of high profile acquisitions in the pharmaceutical space over the last four months, and last week Sony acquired OnLive’s patent portfolio. Earlier today Akamai Technologies, Inc. announced that acquired Octoshape, which will give Akamai access to Octoshape technologies that optimize the quality of video streams for over-the-top content and to enable Internet Protocol television solutions.

At the heart of the Patent Utility is an advanced semantic search engine that identifies the technologies that are relevant to any individual business or entity. The analytical processes behind the semantic search engine will capture text-based information about a company both from publicly available sources and the company itself. This information will typically include product specifications, description of core technologies, identification of key competitors, and research and development priorities. The information is then processed and analyzed against the entire active U.S. patent database, which currently stands at 2.3 million patents and millions of pending applications. The process cross-references the company’s products, components, services, materials, methods and processes with specific patents and claims in the U.S. patent database. The more closely the patent claims relate to a company’s information, the more relevant the patent containing those claims is.

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.