In the past few years, patent values increasingly have been reduced by legislative, judicial and administrative bodies through patent reform and case law. The business impact has been steady downward pressure on royalty rates, increased time to reach deals and a growing trend toward patent holdouts—companies refusing to settle negotiations with a licensing deal. This trend is not likely to change in 2015. As a result, companies are looking outside the box and testing new methods to extract value from patents. These include the expanded use of different and new venues for enforcement, use of privateers and segmented licensing deals (e.g., licenses for less than a full portfolio cross license).
Patent Transactions
In 2014 there were fewer blockbuster technology patent transactions. The biggest were perhaps the following:
- Hewlett-Packard Co. sells 2,400 mobile and Palm OS patents to Qualcomm Inc. (January)
- IBM Corp. sells 943 patents to Twitter Inc. for $36M (February)
- Unwired Planet (mostly former Ericsson) sells patents to Lenovo Group Ltd. for $100M (April)
- American Express Co. sells 685 software patents to Intellectual Ventures (first half of 2014)
- Rockstar Games sells 4,000 patents to RPX Corp. for $900M and closes up shop (December)
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