Dogg, It Must Feel Sick As Hell To License Patents From More Patent Trolls
RPX, a new startup, has come onto the scene offering to aggregate a patent portfolio, and offer a covenant not to sue to companies who license their entire portfolio in aggregate. They are funded by venture capital and also claim to have IBM and Cisco as initial clients.
Dogg, that reminds me of some cards.
Much like Roast Beef’s greeting cards, a technology patent originator can fathomably come up with an infinite pool of them by just applying the same rubric to a new set of circumstances (in the patent trolls’ case, by appending 14 pages of a definition of a computer to tie a business process to a tangible machine — le voila!). This means, as a creator of software technology, you are potentially on the hook for limitless amounts of patent infringement, as nearly everything you can do on a computer has had a patent filed on it in the past 20 years. The mere fact that one entity is aggregating a portfolio of patents has no bearing on the fact that there are potentially unlimited amounts of patents that can be aggregated by others, much as readers of Achewood would probably be able to assist Roast Beef in coming up with limitless amounts of new greeting cards.
It looks like TechCrunch is perhaps appropriately skeptical. Their business model revolves around subscription fees instead of enforcing patents through offensive litigation. If i’m understanding these terms correctly, if you don’t subscribe to their patent portfolio, then you are potentially subject to offensive litigation (which is the practice they are claiming to fight against). Correct me if i’m wrong, but doesn’t this seem to you to just be an extension of existing patent trolling practices (i.e. adding on subscription revenues to existing litigation + settlement proceeds) that is made feasible by the aggregation of large amounts of patents with a large amount of venture capital, instead of an attack on the NPE cottage industry? If so, wouldn’t it seem disingenuous to frame oneself as such?
It is not possible for one entity to aggregate all broad technology patents that pose a threat to oneself. Therefore, the subscription of a company to one particular NPE’s portfolio does not preclude the possibility of being sued for infringement by others. If a subscription model proves to be a more profitable / reliable revenue stream, you can expect other NPEs to adopt it too. Who knows, perhaps portions of the subscription model will be patented by RPX, and they’ll force other NPEs to license their patent as well if they want in to the game. It would be like patenting some aspects of the business process of patent trolling, which would be a fun irony, but still a sad one.
Some days, it seems like buying rights gets you a better return than buying property, but mainly if you’re an asshole.
