Anthony Trippe

While the goal of developing a US innovation policy bolstered by strong IP protections was the focus of the event it was clear that competition with China, who clearly has set their own innovation agenda on a country-wide level, created a clear sense of urgency in the discussions… Generally speaking, the panelists felt that the actions of the last few years had inflicted serious damage on the reliability of patent rights in the US and created substantial doubt about what those rights were worth economically with the changes. The panel was overwhelmingly in favor of making significant changes to the current environment especially with regard to the proceeding at the PTAB.

Patent stories don’t normally make the evening news or the major outlets unless one of the antagonists is called Apple. That changed this week when news broke that Spanx, makers of shapewear undergarments for women, founded by Sara Blakely had filed an action for Declaratory Relief against Times Three Clothiers, doing business as Yummie Tummie, in the Northern District of Georgia. Once the story got to The Huffington Post, as they say, it was on, and quickly went viral being picked up by all of the major television networks, Forbes, Business Week and most of the major newspapers around the country.

Recently, we have seen two examples where the use of patent analytics have had a significant impact on the economic valuation of a collection of patents. The first involved a doubling of the value of RIM’s patent portfolio by a major Canadian bank after it was mentioned as having a stand-out portfolio in a patent study. The second involved the analysis of AOL patent assets where two different sets of analytics provided very different results. In the AOL case, when it came to the eventual purchase by Microsoft, one of the valuations matched almost exactly the price that was paid. Both of these cases demonstrate how important well thought out analytics are to providing signals of value when working with patents.