On July 25, 2014, Bose Corporation filed a patent infringement suit against Beats Electronics, which is in the process of being acquired by Apple for $3 billion.

Let’s take a look at the complaint and what ammunition each side has in its patent portfolio.

Bose alleges that Beats “Studio®” and “Studio® Wireless” brands active noise reduction headphones infringe Bose patented noise cancellation technology.  In the complaint Bose states  “For almost 50 years, Bose has made significant investment in the research, development, engineering, and design of proprietary technologies now implemented in its  products, such as noise cancelling headphones.  Bose’s current line of noise cancelling headphones, for example, embodies inventions protected by at least 36 U.S. patents and applications (22 patents and 14 pending applications) ….. Bose’s latest noise cancelling headphones model, the QC20, is protected by at least 27 U.S. patents and applications (14 patents and 13 pending applications)”.   In the complaint Bose asserts that Beat is infringing the following U.S. patents (the “Asserted Patents”):

My previous article showed how expensive patents are – from $220,000 to $440,000 to file and maintain a patent in the United States and 9 other major industrial countries.  I also discussed one experiment that showed that data driven patent analytics could predict manually determined patent maintenance fee payment decisions over 70% of the time while dramatically reducing the time and cost to conduct the manual review.  In this current article I describe best practice Patent Maintenance Fee Payment Decision Processes.  

IPVision has worked with many companies to implement evidence-based data driven processes for the cost-effective evaluation and management of patents.  The specific processes that are adopted differ somewhat in the details because companies differ in their culture and structure and because of their differing industry technology and competitive environments. 

Although the specific processes differ there are core components in each of these programs.  The following is a step-by-step compendium of the best practices I have seen.

The first article in this series discussed the reasons for increased activity in Patent Portfolio Trafficking, i.e. patent portfolios offered for sale or license.   The second article described how companies with Small Volumes of portfolios to evaluate were able to streamline their patent evaluation processes from weeks to days using a Metric Driven Approach.  The third article looked at companies that have more fully Integrated Patent Analytics into their patent portfolio acquisition process.  This article discusses how organizations dealing with larger volumes of patents are integrating IPVision’s efficient and comprehensive patent evaluation metrics into their processes.

The first article in this series discussed the reasons for increased activity in Patent Portfolio Trafficking, i.e. patent portfolios offered for sale or license.   The second article described how companies with Small Volumes of portfolios to evaluate were able to streamline their patent evaluation processes from weeks to days using a Metric Driven Approach.  This article looks at companies that have more fully integrated patent analytics into their patent portfolio acquisition process.

In the first article of this series we explored the forces that have given rise to a more active market in Patent Portfolio Trafficking. In summary, increased recognition of the value of intellectual assets, increased ability to analyze and measure IP, the Open Innovation movement and increased Senior Management involvement in IP. In this and the following articles of this series we present real cases (disguised for confidentiality) of how companies are trying to deal with Patent Portfolio Trafficking.

The volume of patent portfolio acquisition transactions in the past few years has increased greatly.  Press reports have naturally focused on the “big deals” from a patent valuation viewpoint such as:

• Nortel Networks $4.5B patent sale (2011)
• Google’s $12+B acquisition of Motorola Mobility (2011)
• AOL’s $1B sale of 800+ patents to Microsoft and subsequent sale of 650 patents to Facebook (2012)
• Kodak Digital Imaging Portfolio $525M (2013)

These are certainly impressive and newsworthy but what has not been widely reported is the increasing activity in smaller patent portfolios.   This is the first of a series of articles on this trend and how companies are responding to it.   These articles are based on the work we have been doing in the past 12 months for a wide variety of companies.  In this article we set the stage by looking at the forces that are driving this portfolio trafficking.

Georgia Tech recently announced a "New Patent Mapping System Helps Find Innovation Pathways".   This research created "a new patent mapping system that considers how patents cite one another may help researchers better understand the relationships between technologies – and how they may come together to spur disruptive new areas of innovation."

The first day of Twitter's IPO was spectacular with the stock soaring 73% by the end of the first day of trading.  However, there are storm clouds on the horizon.  As reported by Ingrid Lunden in TechCrunch IBM has alleged that Twitter infringes on "at least three U.S. patents" held by IBM.   To understand this situation IPVision mapped these IBM patents as well as Twitter's own patent portfolio.

IPVision, along with members of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty, hosted a live webinar on Wednesday, October 9 at 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT that updated participants on the ongoing progress of joint research that will bring increased understanding of how strategic / operating companies make decisions related to patent transactions.

The Lemelson-MIT Awards Committee announced that the 2013 Winner of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize is Angela Belcher, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy in Materials Science and Biological Engineering at M.I.T. and a faculty member at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

According to The Lemelson-MIT Program the Prize "recognizes individuals who translate their ideas into inventions and innovations that improve the world in which we live....Dubbed the "Oscar for Inventors," the Lemelson-MIT Prize is awarded to outstanding mid-career inventors who have developed a patented product or process of significant value to society, which has been adopted for practical use, or has a high probability of being adopted."

The focus of Prof. Belcher’s research is understanding and using the process by which nature makes materials in order to design novel hybrid organic-inorganic electronic and magnetic materials on new length scales.  She then uses these materials in applications as varied as solar cells, batteries, medical diagnostics and basic single molecule interactions related to disease.  Her research is highly interdisciplinary and brings together the fields of inorganic chemistry, materials chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology and electrical engineering.