Licensing Without Litigation
Licensing Without Litigation
Perhaps the most important aspect of running any business or factory is the ability to deploy and monetize good ideas. A company’s higher purpose is more than market share and balance sheets. Sharing ideas and inventions globally accelerates human development by making innovation more accessible — driving prosperity, improving living standards, and even saving lives.
Unleashing Inventors And Innovators
The Origin of Patents
Patents were first created in China as a way to enable critical innovation and knowledge sharing. Patents were meant to be teaching tools, advancing human development when the patented inventions became widely used — and enriching the patent owners in the process, who would be paid by those who used their ideas. Inventors opt to teach how to duplicate their inventions via a patent, and expect compensation when someone uses the patented invention.
Industry today is rife with painful roadblocks to innovation and prosperity for both patent owners and product manufacturers. If patent licensing was easier, uniformly priced and transparent, manufacturers and service providers could get new offerings to market faster and patent owners could more easily profit from their inventions. More efficient patent licensing via PatentBooks unleashes a wave of profit for both parties, unfetters the global economy, and restores the promise for which the entire concept of patents was originally conceived.
Consider how factories and businesses get the clean water and electricity they need to operate. Human society decided long ago that water and electricity are necessities best accumulated and delivered by specialized third-party companies, i.e. utility companies, rather than by individuals.
Tap water may originate in any number of possible places. We, as users, do not know if our tap water originated from a well, a reservoir, a stream, or desalination plant. We don’t care. We just care that the water coming out of the tap is clean and useful for our task. Somewhere in the delivery system, a meter measures how much water we use. We pay only for what we use. The water utility divides our usage payments among its sources for water.
Electricity is the same. When we plug into an outlet, high-quality electricity comes from that outlet. We do not know if that electricity originated from a battery, a coal-fired plant, a solar panel, a wind turbine, a nuclear plant or a hydroelectric plant. We don’t care. We just know that there is a meter monitoring our usage. We pay an electric company for only the electricity we use. The electric utility company must pay its sources for generating electricity.
What if product innovators could simply “plug in” to a source of patented ideas? Rather than worrying about the source and value of each of the thousands of ideas required to bring their final product to market, they access a single, dependable “idea source” that drives their next product — effectively metering their usage of patented ideas and simplifying their cash flows.
The Solution for Patent Licensing
The most efficient, sane, and safe way to get paid fairly for the use of patents and to license the entire volume of patents or patent portfolios that may be used in a product is via a single source — a PatentBook. A PatentBook promises patent owners and product innovators a shorter path to profit and gives everyone more time to focus on profitable innovation, benefitting us all. The alternative, for both product innovators and patent owners, is often litigation — a tragically expensive, distracting, and risky way to pay for small quantities of the volumes of patents that may be used in a product.
Large Patent Portfolios
Companies that invest heavily in research and development often build large patent portfolios. Maintaining a large patent portfolio is extremely expensive, especially if the portfolio is not making money. Maintaining any patent that does not yield income is generally a poor investment. Earning income from patents is wise. The owners of the patents can earn income by both incorporating the patent into their own products or services and by licensing their patents for use by someone else.
Patent Owners Reduce Costs and Increase Income Predictably, Without Distraction
Today, a patent owner who asks a user of his or her patented technologies to pay for their use is routinely dismissed, ignored, or rejected. This patent owner is part of a large and unhappy group, being only one of hundreds or thousands of people who own patents that may be used in a commercially significant product. Patent owners and patent users find it very difficult to ascertain the value of any individual patent in a commercially significant product. All parties suffer from the lack of a transparent and standardized system for assessing aggregate, much less individual, patent value. The failure to reach agreement often results in litigation to force payment. The cost of litigation as a means to get paid for the use of patents is extreme, especially relative to the total value of the entire transaction. Litigation costs of 50% to 90% of the entire transaction are common. In patent litigation, the only parties who always benefit are the lawyers.
Comprehensive patent licensing via a PatentBook creates a virtuous ecosystem that helps everyone. Publishing patents in a PatentBook is easy and free. All published patents in a PatentBook are guaranteed to receive payments without litigation or distraction. Rigorous and fair evaluation of all patents in a given PatentBook creates a transparent, tiered system that ensures mutual understanding of patent value and regular payments for patent owners.
Accurate and Fair Patent Evaluation
If a patent owner believes he has a seminal patent, he uses the standardized TAEUSworks™ patent evaluation criteria to evaluate the patent for placement into one of the top PatentBook compensation tiers. TAEUSworks, which for more than 20 years has been the "gold standard of patent evaluation methodologies", extracts the educated opinions of carefully selected subject matter experts (SMEs) focused on consistent technical, legal, and economic patent licensing criteria. All patents listed in a PatentBook, regardless of their origin or technology, are evaluated using identical criteria. When the best patents are identified, they are placed into the upper tiers of the PatentBook.
Consider how factories and businesses get the clean water and electricity they need to operate. Human society decided long ago that water and electricity are necessities best accumulated and delivered by specialized third-party companies, i.e. utility companies, rather than by individuals.
Tier 1
Patents in Tier 1 share 60% of all the payments made to Publishers with the owners of the top 1% of the total number of patents in the PatentBook. Tier 1 patent evaluations are all visible to the public, providing recognition for the innovation and creativity of all Tier 1 patents, inventors, and owners.
Tier 2
Tier 2 consists of 9% of all the patents in the PatentBook as determined by patent quality. Tier 2 patents uniformly share 30% of the total distributed income.
Tier 3
Tier 3 patents, comprising the remaining 90% of all patents in the PatentBook, uniformly share the remaining 10% of all the money distributed. This value distribution is uniform for all patent portfolios, regardless of the technology, product or ownership.
The high compensation and public recognition of the technological leadership of the owners of top-tier patents helps these owners with additional investment and recruiting for the top minds in the PatentBook product area. The validation of being in a PatentBook brings benefits far beyond predictable, litigation-free revenue.
Avoiding Disruptions and Distractions
The best part about PatentBook licensing is that patent owners are able to get paid for other peoples’ use of their patents without any of the disruptions to normal business associated with enforcement. The PatentBook Administrator seeks licensees for the entire PatentBook on behalf of all published patent owners and distributes the income to the owners according to the quality and tier of their published patents. This enables the patent owner to concentrate on business, rather than burning time and money policing the use of his intellectual property and spending resources trying to collect for its use. PatentBooks also allow the patent owner to enjoy a continuous predictable stream of income that had previously not been available.
Encouraging Invention and Innovation
One other very important aspect of PatentBooks is the ability of a patent owner to directly compare his or her patents’ quality against other patents’ quality. The evaluations and scores of Tier 1 PatentBook patents are visible online to the public. This allows anyone to judge not only the rest of their own patents and inventions against the best patents in that field, but also to thoughtfully consider subsequent invention disclosures. Applying TAEUSworks patent evaluation criteria to invention disclosures results in higher quality patent applications and potentially fewer patent applications overall. This reduces distractions, costs, and unnecessary patent processing for inventive organizations.
Product Innovators Buy Freedom To Operate, Open New Markets, Add New Features Freely
Most innovators want to make great products that incorporate great inventions, meeting market demands and building value in their brands. Great ideas and inventions occur all over our planet. Today, our ability to communicate across cultures, time zones, nationalities, and languages allows the best ideas to be understood anywhere in the world. Since a patent contains a complete recipe for duplicating an invention, searching national patent archives is one of the most efficient ways of discovering elegant and thoughtful technological solutions.
Subscribing to PatentBooks
By subscribing to a PatentBook, the product innovators have an easy expense line in their cost structure, allowing the business to use any of the thousands of patented inventions published to the PatentBook. This expense line is predictable and manageable, enabling the manufacturer to more quickly explore and open many new markets without the threat of patent infringement litigation. Manufacturers gain massive peace of mind while also being secure in the knowledge that they are not overpaying for patent licenses that they do not use, because payments are based on production volumes. The PatentBook subscriber knows that everyone pays the same rate he pays, and the online PatentBook transaction is very easy.
The biggest benefit that innovators experience is the freedom to concentrate on their core business and improve products, processes, and systems without worrying about being sued for patent infringement. Patent infringement litigation is extremely unpredictable, can surprise and disrupt a company, and distract a company significantly from its core business. Patent litigation can and does ruin companies.
Eliminating Litigation
PatentBooks eliminates patent litigation as a means for extracting payments from the users of patented technologies, distributing subscriber payments fairly to publishers. Subscribers do not care who gets the income, as long as the subscriber is free to use the best inventions without risk of infringement litigation or product injunctions.
Think of all the untold millions of dollars being tied up in courtrooms around the world today as patent owners and product innovators fight thousands of battles tooth-and-nail to resolve patent licensing and intellectual property disputes. Compound this with the stress and distraction (and often, bad press and brand damage) to companies who could otherwise focus on making great things that improve people’s lives while easily and fairly paying the legion of inventors who enable new features, improvements, and big leaps forward. For decades, this landscape has been considered business as usual. We consider it a tragedy. And it’s all entirely avoidable via PatentBooks.
Imagine instead the true genius of the consumer marketplace unlocked for the good of all patent owners, product manufacturers, and the billions across the globe who are ready for the next dazzling innovation. This is more than good business — it’s good for all of global humanity.
Renewing the Promise
Patents were conceived to help people with great ideas get recognition and compensation for their ingenuity while enabling and teaching the tinkerers, thinkers, and innovators who use that ingenuity. That promise has been corrupted. PatentBooks restores the innovative potential of patents by revolutionizing patent licensing. Using and compensating the best ideas is easy, predictable, equitable, and logical, rather than combative, convoluted, unfair and unproductive. Product manufacturers can and will incorporate the world’s best ideas and disclosed inventions. Inventors and patents owners alike are now able to enjoy fair income for the use of their patented inventions. Consumers of PatentBook licensed products will know that their purchase price covers not just labor and materials, but will also deliver income to the sources of the inventions and ideas that made the products possible.
PatentBooks accelerates global innovation by reducing the path between an idea and profits, creating a new era that benefits all. Become a Publisher or Subscriber to PatentBooks today to utilize this revolutionary patent licensing solution!
