Tech Giants Band Together to Buy and Sell Patents, But Not for Profit
About eight years ago, Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft exec started Intellectual Ventures, a company that amasses patents that it can then license. Several tech giants, including Nokia, Intel, Apple and Sony, invest money in the holding company’s war chest.
Now, several big tech companies are banding together in a slightly different patent-related venture. As the WSJ’s Amol Sharma reports, Verizon, Google and Cisco are among a group of companies joining up to defend themselves against patent-infringement suits by buying up patents before the so-called patent trolls get their hands on them.
Here’s how it works: The venture, called Allied Security Trust, buys patents that others might use to bring infringement claims against its members. Member companies will pay roughly $250,000 to join the group and will each put about $5 million into escrow with the organization, to go toward future patent purchases. (Before you scream “antitrust!”, the groups CEO, Brian Hinman, a former VP of intellectual property and licensing at IBM, says the group doesn’t face any antitrust issues because it isn’t a profit-making venture and its members don’t actually own patents — they just grant themselves a license to them.)
To head off concerns that the group will use litigation as a strategy, Allied Security Trust will sell the patents they acquire after they’ve granted themselves a nonexclusive license to the underlying technology. “It will never be an enforcement vehicle,” said Hinman. “It isn’t the intent of the companies to make money on the transactions.”
If this enterprise does not turn out to be a money pit, the law of unintended consequences will probably take effect. Outsiders will probably get sued for patent infringement, whatever the public intentions now.
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Mow let’s cut to the chase and go to the following interesting website:
http://www.bushisantichrist.com/
With a little juggling, the guy at that website adds ups the value of George Bush’s name in Hebrew and comes up with the number, hold your breath, 666. The mark of the Beast
Amazing what you can do with numbers even if you are not a Federal Reserve board member.
Selling the patents after you grant yourself a license to use them is just begging for trouble long term. Somebody is going to find or get a court to find a hole in one of the agreements and the new patent holder is going to troll OR, one of the members of the group are going to do the same thing and biff it. Regardless of how the perception goes, it would be far safer for AST to buy and hold. Just remember what happened with SCO and Linux because Novell came along.
If their intent is for the patents not to be enforced, they should just buy the patents, and then dedicate them to the public so no one can sue. Sounds like they want to sell them to someone (a troll) who will sue their competitors.
Might makes right! This in an ingenious approach. The best way to get rid of these patent trolls is to outspend them. It used to be we could simply outspend them at the courthouse but this upstream purchasing intervention puts the money into the problem before its gets to the courthouse. No one loses but the lawyers! Lets hope the Chamber of Commerce starts a special working group on this issue to keep up with it. Congrats on the genius move!
So the Big Guys don’t want to pay for licensing legitimate patents. Small companies / small inventors are tagged ‘trolls’ and ripped off.
For a slightly different spin on the same idea: see http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/
I see..
The big corporate crooks failed to bribe US Congress to bail them out of their current patent infringement problems so now they want to pull more money together to fix the situation
I have a better solution for those corporate patent infringers:
“Thou shall not steal”
Just stop willfully infringing on someone else’s patents and you won’t have to worry about getting sued
interesting..
