May 19, 2016 — Here’s some potentially good news for those of you sitting on patents that you’ve done nothing with — someone may want to buy those old patents. Over a two week period from May 25th to June 8th, patent owners can submit their patents to a special portal set up by Allied Security Trust , a nonprofit organization established in 2008 to streamline the buying and selling of patents.
The initiative is called the Industry Patent Purchase Program (IP3) and is comprised of 18 companies including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Kia Motors, Verizon, Cisco and Arris. The firms will review all submitted patents and inform the owners by July 29th if they are interested in purchasing. Categories include: automotive, communication/content delivery systems, location-based services, computer systems, consumer electronics, cloud computing, infrastructure software, application software, communication equipment, wireless, semiconductor, components, healthcare/medical, lighting and financial services. The companies involved in IP3 have agreed to not sue each other for patent infringement involving the patents that are purchased as part of the program.
Russell Binns, the CEO of Allied Security Trust, tells TBR that IP3 is an outgrowth of a program initiated by Google last year and that the tech firm wanted to expand it across several industries. According to Google, it spent an average of $48,000 per patent it purchased last year through the initial program. It bought 28% of the patents that were submitted and paid anywhere from $3,000 to $250,000 per patent. At least 25% of the patents it purchased came from individual inventors with another 33% from brokers.
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