It is my pleasure to turn the podium over to my friend Tam Harbert, an independent journalist based in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Tam is the reason I ended up at CodeX!  In 2013, she wrote a wonderful cover story for ALM’s Law Technology News about CodeX and Roland Vogl. She discussed startups, including Ravel Law, Law Gives, the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange, Lex Machina (and Mark Michels, of Deloitte, wrote about the first CodeX FutureLaw Conference). I was among the many who were mesmerized by their stories!  Follow Harbert’s blog here. —Monica Bay

By Tam Harbert
In the ongoing war against patent trolls, a group of companies is following a model created by Google Inc.’s experimental Patent Purchase Promotion last summer.

The promotion, which ran from April to August 2015, opened a window for anyone—other companies, individual inventors, patent brokers—to sell Google their patents at a take-it-or-leave-it price set by the patent holder. Google said it received thousands of submissions, of which it bought 28 percent.

“Clearly, there was interest in what we learned,” Kurt Brasch, the company’s senior product licensing manager at the time, told IEEE Spectrum, in “Google Tries to Keep Patents Out of the Hands of Trolls.” “This is something that the industry could learn from. It opened a dialogue with other operating companies that I think will provide some benefits down the road,” he said.

Clearly, it did. This summer a group of about 20 companies—including Google, Facebook, Inc., International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Microsoft Corp.—launched the Industry Patent Purchase Program (IP3). The program is being run by Allied Security Trust (AST), a non-profit group of companies that buys patents in an attempt to keep them out of the hands of trolls. In fact, it’s not clear how the IP3 differs from what AST already does, except that it has adopted the exact process Google used in its program:

• The group set a window of time—May 25 to June 8—in which owners could submit their patents and their selling price.
• Upon close of that window, IP3 reviewed the submissions and by July 29 contacted those whose patents they were interested in purchasing.
• IP3 is now conducting additional due diligence on the patents.
• The group expected that all transactions and payments would be completed by September.

“Last year, Google had great success with their Patent Purchase Promotion,” said Russell Binns Jr., CEO of AST. “IP3 goes a step further, giving sellers the ability to reach across multiple industries and make the patent marketplace operate more efficiently for everyone.”

Cover image: Clipart.com