Wide IP Vision as an Antidote to Trolls

A resurgence in M&A activity has occurred at the same time that much attention is being paid to the vexing problem of the patent troll.

The ability and willingness to practice “open innovation,” to broadly and regularly survey the IP landscape of seemingly irrelevant invention activities in (seemingly) nonrelated industries, and to add strategic in-licensing as a business development complement to M&A could go a long way in reducing the rising threat of the patent troll.

Trolls, a term invented by Peter Detkin while he was at Intel, refers to a firm whose sole purpose is to assert allegedly fundamental, infringed patents against those technology firms shipping products that allegedly practice those patents’ claims.

Owners of these fundamental patents would rather use the term legitimate enforcement operations rather than the more commonly used troll.

But as evidenced by the $600 million-plus settlement that ended the RIM (BlackBerry)-NTP battle, this is a growing problem for companies shipping products.

These patents picked up by trolls did not start life, for the most part, with assertion in mind. They were the embodiments of would-be technology products that, for one reason or the other, never got off the ground.

Failed technology product companies, whose only remaining value is a few patents filed years before, have no other monetization avenue than assertion. Certainly, many of those patents are not truly seminal. In those cases, these ...

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