infringement

News has been circulating that AOL, Inc. is looking for buyers or licensors of its patent portfolio. One of AOL’s top investors has suggested the portfolio is worth, if “appropriately harvested,” more than $1B in licensing income alone. Prospective buyers of the AOL portfolio should remember that Google paid $12.5B for a patent portfolio that has 48% potential commercial impairment. In this case, 71% of AOL’s U.S. patents have potential commercial impairment.

On March 12, 2012, Yahoo! filed a patent infringement suit against Facebook. In the complaint, Yahoo! alleges that “Facebook's entire social networking model … is based on Yahoo!'s patent social networking technology.” A bold statement, since all but one of the asserted patents underwent extensive claim amendments AFTER Facebook was incorporated in 2004. What does this mean? It means the asserted Yahoo! patents have the dual benefit of a pre-2004 application date and a post-2004 visibility into technologies that Facebook had already reduced to practice.

On February 29, 2012, iBio, Inc., a pharmaceutical company, announced the issuance of a patent on an influenza virus vaccine. As a result, iBio’s stock increased over 10% during a time when the overall market was declining – proving, yet again, that intangible assets influence marginal value (or at least investor emotion and sentiment). This announcement and subsequent rise in iBio’s stock value is particularly interesting considering Fraunhofer USA, Inc. was, at least at the time, listed as the patent’s inventor and assignee.

Amazon owns a growing set of social networking patents that describe key aspects of Facebook and legally predate Facebook by seven (7) years. Given Facebook’s strategy of back-filling its patent portfolio to retroactively protect itself (i.e. the company filed over 410 US patent applications in the past 18 months vs its 56 granted US patents), what do these Amazon patents mean to Facebook's investors and its forecast $100 billion dollar valuation?

On February 16, 2012, Intellectual Ventures (“IV”) launched its seventh patent infringement suit, this time against AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile . In a familiar pattern, all but one of the patents in the suit were assigned to what appear to be IV “shell” companies before their most recent assignment to Intellectual Ventures by name. To IV’s chagrin, all three defendants control significant intellectual property estates in the technology space of the asserted patents; AT&T alone owns almost 500 properties that predate the patents being asserted against them.