Posts in Licensing

Lenders and investors like Gerchen Keller and Fortress, among others, have provided capital to or are partnering with private and public NPEs. These business are well suited to assessing market conditions, especially value, and calculating risk for given rights in a specific industry. That they are still willing to fund activities and co-invest in this climate is a testament to the durability of good patents. Also, there is some expectation that we are at or near bottom, and that there are more opportunities now.

If you were buying patents in 2015, you likely did better than any previous year. The patent market, and, in particular, the brokered patent market, continues to be a robust market for buying and selling patents. Prices are down unless an EOU is available. Sales rates are up, and sales are tending to happen earlier. Caselaw impacted the market but not as much as you might have expected (Alice impacted fintech patents much more than software patents). With an estimated $233M in patent sales, we think the patent market will continue to provide interesting opportunities for both patent buyers and sellers.

Alice certainly has dealt a huge blow to patent market, reversing the growth momentum of most market players, big or small. However, the decline in patent sales revenue has significantly decelerated to 5% in 2015, based on the estimated data. Not all segments of IP industry have weathered the Alice storm equally well. Most NPEs have seen their share prices plunging half to nearly 100%. There will be more restructuring and further consolidation in NPE business in 2016.

Open licenses are private arrangements that work within the current legal regime to encourage innovation, discourage trolls, and help attract top engineering talent. It is a win-win solution for different patenting companies and user’s society. There are several different types of most common open licenses. A License of Transfer Agreement (or shortly, a LOT agreement), that helps to prevent legal suits from non-practicing entities that purchase patents for the sole purpose of enforcing them (called Patent Assertion Entities, or PAEs). Under the LOT Agreement, every company that participates, grants a license to the other participants where the license becomes effective only when patents are transferred to non-participants.

Patent licensing is becoming increasingly challenging and it requires thorough preparation on the licensor’s part to convince a potential licensee that a license is both required and inevitable and to persuade them into serious negotiations. The steps involved will vary based on whether your patents are already being infringed upon or if they protect a new technology that can extend market value or penetration. In this article, the focus is on the research and preparation for the licensing of patents that may already be in use.

“I don’t think investors care about names,” Croxall said. “I think they care about results. I have the troll conversation, but it is never with investors. Are they getting smarter about the risk of going to trial? I think they have… I think you get punished more for losing than rewarded for winning.” Croxall also acknowledged that the troll issue seems to have penetrated into the jury box. Hartstein would later agree that public IP companies get punished at least twice as much with a litigation loss as compared with a litigation victory.

EDWARD JUNG: ”At the other end of that value chain you now have some of the most valuable companies in the entire world in places like China. What stops them from taking all of the value they’ve been able to derive from their over one billion population base, which well capitalizes them, and coming in and competing in the US? The US has not seen so many threats to their industry come from outside the US as opposed to within the US so in that sense I think that’s a whole new set of interesting problems to think about. I’ve actually had encounters with Chinese companies asking if there was some kind of, you know, hidden trick in the way we appear to be opening our market for them to freely come in without any IP barriers. For example, in pairing software and IP and so on and so forth.”

As Key works with inventors he coaches, who he refers to as students because he teaches them how to do much of the work for themselves, he explained that increasingly he is seeing interest on the part of companies in licensing inventions without a patent attached to the product. ”What we have noticed is that companies say they care about patents, but the bottom line is really about speed to market and how fast they are going to be able to sell them,” Key explained. ”The life cycle for products is so short.”

While hedging risk is a well known and widely accepted investment tactic, there is something rather bizarre about someone who is such a vocal critic doing exactly what they criticize others for doing.

Covenant Not to Challenge clauses are common in patent licenses, including licenses that are part of post-litigation settlements. clause is seen as a benefit bargained for under a license agreement and constitutes part of the consideration obtained by the licensor for the license. The intended effect of such a clause is to allow the licensor to make an estoppel argument in the event that licensee does challenge the patent, in spite of its agreement not to do so. However, the PTAB thus concluded that without an express grant from Congress, it did not have the authority to recognize contractual estoppel as a bar to an inter partes review.

With so much brash bluster, it was inevitable that Cuban would argue himself into a corner eventually. It finally looks like Cuban’s shoot from the mouth first approach is exposing him as something of a patent hypocrite. More specifically, Mark Cuban recently made threatening comments toward Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT), threatening the retail giant with a patent infringement lawsuit of his own. It would seem that Cuban, like so many others who so loudly want patent reform, have an exceptionally dim view of your patents, but his patents are rock solid and deserve to be respected. Such hypocrisy is not new in the patent reform debate, but it is extremely telling.

Three-time Oscar nominee Frank Darabont (The Green Mile; The Shawshank Redemption) brought the The Walking Dead TV show to life. He wrote, directed, and produced the pilot episode, and served as the showrunner and executive producer (often-synonymous positions) for its smash-hit first season. It was surprising then, when AMC suddenly fired Darabont while Season 2 was in production, and after sending him to promote the series at Comic-Con. Darabont sued in New York State Court in December of 2013, and recently amended his complaint to include the lack of accreditation and profits allegedly owed him from AMC’s “companion series,” Fear the Walking Dead.

Like a lemming running off a cliff, Fortune author Jeff John Roberts ignores easily verifiable historical truths in what can really only be described as a hit piece on the patent system and patents in general. The lack of intellectual integrity, or even intellectual curiosity, is astonishing… It is absolutely necessary to quash any suggestion that here is a “short supply” of medical miracles today. Medical research is still turning up incredible findings. A quick scan of health news shows plenty of academic innovation leading to tomorrow’s medical miracles. That the author could make such an utterly absurd statement has to call into question the broader motivations. Of course, authors do unfortunately sometimes exaggerate, misrepresent and even lie. What is truly astonishing is how the Editors of Fortune allowed such a falsehood to be published. Do they do no fact checking at all at Fortune?

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the GeForce GTX 950 is its low price. Nvidia has typically stayed out of the low end budget GPU processing units, content to leave that sector to both AMD and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC). However, the GeForce GTX 950 retails for $160, representing a serious foray into the low end GPU market which covers most units selling for under $200. It’s not optimal for video games which utilize 4K resolutions but models handling those resolution sizes can cost many hundreds of dollars per unit, made worse by the fact that 1080p is still the pixel resolution standard for video gaming so the extra firepower is largely unnecessary as of yet.

As the new academic year starts in earnest we can be sure that the all too familiar attacks on the patent system will reemerge, as they always seem to do. Patent critics, who are not averse to making provably false claims, seem to believe that if they repeatedly say something that is false enough times it will miraculously become true. Hard to pin down, patent critics will deflect reality with thought experiments based in fiction and fantasy. They demand what we know to be true is actually false, as if we are in some parallel, bizzaro universe where up is down and white is black.