 | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Legal services |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founder | Kevin Jakel |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California |
| Website | www |
Unified Patents is a member-based organization whose goal is promoting innovation by protecting against frivolous patent litigation and reducing the number of non-practicing entity (NPE) patent assertions in specific technology areas.
Instances of NPE patent litigation have grown recently: NPEs (commonly referred to as patent trolls) accounted for the majority of patent infringement litigation in the U.S. in 2012, compared to less than a quarter in 2007. [1] This is because NPEs can achieve a quick return on investment since most companies settle rather than fight, even if they believe the assertion to be invalid. [2]
Unified permits small and large companies alike to become members. [3] Smaller members act as an early warning system by notifying Unified of NPE demand letters in exchange for notifying Unified if they ever plan to sell a Patent to an NPE. [4] Unified defines discrete technology zones for members to join, including cloud storage, content delivery, or electronic payments to ensure Unified’s deterrence is focused. [5] [6]
Unified also directly challenges the validity of NPE patents. [7] By filing several inter partes reviews (IPRs) against patents owned by NPEs, Unified seeks to increase the costs that NPEs face when asserting invalid patents and to deter future NPEs from doing the same thing again. [8] Unified also publishes monthly newsletters summarizing NPE activity against small businesses and technology companies. [9]
Unified Patents was founded in 2012 by Kevin Jakel and Brian Hinman. Mr. Jakel is the former head of intellectual property litigation at Intuit. Mr. Hinman formerly worked as a vice president of InterDigital. [10] In January 2013, Unified signed its first member. [11] Since 2012, Unified has grown to more than 60 members including NetApp and Google. [12] [13] Unified Patents filed its first IPR against Clouding IP's patent 6,738,799. [14] Since then Unified has filed several IPRs against patent trolls (e.g. against PersonalWeb regarding patent 5,978,791). [15] In June and July 2016 Unified filed IPRs on patents belonging to the three most litigious NPEs of 2016: Uniloc, Sportbrain Holdings, and Shipping & Transit LLC, who together sued more than 200 companies in 2016. [16]
Unified Patents seeks to deter patent trolls from asserting poor quality patents in certain technology zones through a number of strategies. Unified collects annual fees from its members to fund its activities. Small companies are not charged by Unified. [17] [18] Unified assesses the risk posed by NPEs by monitoring NPE assertions. [19] This information is used to challenge NPE owned patents. [20] Some of Unified IPRs have already ended in settlement. [21] Unified Patents does not pay for purchasing or licensing patents from patent trolls or NPEs. [22]
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention. In most countries, patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce their rights.
Rambus Inc., founded in 1990, is an American technology company that designs, develops and licenses chip interface technologies and architectures that are used in digital electronics products. The company is well known for inventing RDRAM and for its intellectual property-based litigation following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.
The software patent debate is the argument about the extent to which, as a matter of public policy, it should be possible to patent software and computer-implemented inventions. Policy debate on software patents has been active for years. The opponents to software patents have gained more visibility with fewer resources through the years than their pro-patent opponents. Arguments and critiques have been focused mostly on the economic consequences of software patents.
In international law and business, patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art, often through hardball legal tactics. Patent trolls often do not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question. However, some entities, which do not practice their asserted patent, may not be considered "patent trolls", when they license their patented technologies on reasonable terms in advance.
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP is a global white shoe law firm headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The firm employs approximately 800 attorneys throughout 23 offices around the world.
Open Invention Network (OIN) is a company that acquires patents and licenses them royalty-free to its community members who, in turn, agree not to assert their own patents against Linux and Linux-related systems and applications.
Fish & Richardson P.C. is a global patent, intellectual property litigation, and commercial litigation law firm with more than 400 attorneys and technology specialists across the US and Europe. Fish is active in both patent litigation and patent prosecution services among Fortune 100 companies. Fish has been named the #1 patent litigation firm in the U.S. for 12 consecutive years.
Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications.
T. John Ward is a retired United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. He is best known for the large number of patent infringement cases brought before his court in Marshall, Texas.
RPX Corporation is an American provider of international risk management services for patents. The company was founded in March 2008, and is based in San Francisco. It was incorporated on July 15, 2008. By acquiring patents that pose potential problems and providing information on litigation, RPX seeks to reduce patent assertions directed at its clients.
Defensive patent aggregation (DPA) is the practice of purchasing patents or patent rights to keep such patents out of the hands of entities that would assert them against operating companies. The opposite is offensive patent aggregation (OPA) which is the purchasing of patents in order to assert them against companies that would use the inventions protected by such patents and to grant licenses to these operating companies in return for licensing fees or royalties. OPA can be practiced by operating companies or non-practicing entities (NPEs)
David "Dave" J. Kappos is an attorney and former government official who served as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 2009 to 2013. Kappos is currently a partner at New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Vringo was a technology company that became involved in the worldwide patent wars. The company won a 2012 intellectual property lawsuit against Google, in which a U.S. District Court ordered Google to pay 1.36 percent of U.S. AdWords sales. Analysts estimated Vringo's judgment against Google to be worth over $1 billion. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned the District Court's ruling on appeal in August 2014 in a split 2-1 decision, which Intellectual Asset Magazine called "the most troubling case of 2014." Vringo appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Vringo also pursued worldwide litigation against ZTE Corporation in twelve countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, India, Spain, Netherlands, Romania, China, Malaysia, Brazil and the United States. The high profile nature of the intellectual property suits filed by the firm against large corporations known for anti-patent tendencies has led some commentators to refer to the firm as a patent vulture or patent troll.
McKool Smith is a U.S. trial firm with more than 130 trial lawyers across seven offices in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Marshall, New York City, and Washington, DC. The firm represents clients in disputes involving commercial litigation, intellectual property (IP), bankruptcy, and white collar defense matters.
A copyright troll is a party that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through strategic litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, sometimes without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through the inequities and unintended consequences of high statutory damages provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works.
A patent privateer or intellectual property privateer is a party, typically a patent assertion entity, authorized by another party, often a technology corporation, to use intellectual property to attack other operating companies. Privateering provides a way for companies to assert intellectual property against their competitors with a significantly reduced risk of retaliation and as a means for altering their competitive landscape. The strategy began with a handful of large operating companies. In April 2013, a group of technology companies asked the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the privateering strategy as an impediment to competition.
Michelle Kwok Lee, born 1965 in Santa Clara, California, was vice president of Amazon Web Services and a former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
An inter partes review (IPR) is a procedure for challenging the validity of a United States patent before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Patexia Inc. is a privately held intellectual property (IP) company based in Santa Monica, California, U.S. The company was founded in 2010 with the mission to enhance transparency and efficiency in the IP field through a leveraging of the knowledge of an IP-based online community of researchers, attorneys, and stakeholders—described by the company as a “multidisciplinary social network”—for the purpose of information crowdsourcing. In addition, the company combines patent and litigation databases to provide analytical tools regarding the IP field, including the details of attorneys, law firms, companies, and examiners, for its community members.
Marta Francesca Belcher is an American technology attorney who has been called a pioneer in the area of blockchain law.