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IBM Seeking 'Patent-Protection-Racket' Patent
theodp writes "Wikipedia defines a protection racket as an extortion scheme whereby a powerful non-governmental organization coerces businesses to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase the organization's 'protection' services against various external threats. Compare this to IBM's just-published patent application for 'Extracting Value from a Portfolio of Assets', which describes a process by which 'very large corporations' impress upon smaller businesses that paying for 'the protection of a large defensive patent portfolio' would be 'a prudent business decision' for them to make, 'just like purchasing a fire insurance policy.' Sounds like Fat Tony's been to Law School, eh? Time for IBM to put-their-money-where-their-patent-reform-mouth-is and deep-six this business method patent claim!"
I don't suppose anyone has considered that they might use said patent to sue trolls out of existence. Which would be neat, and altogether too ironic.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
If IBM receives the patent, then it can disallow others from participating in the practice. This patent alone could be a jury-rigged bit of patent reform, for this particular abuse. (Assuming IBM doesn't go crazy and utilize the patent itself.)
I'd tend to think this is more their purpose, than to become the master bully.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I'm sorry, but this is beautiful. For IBM to patent the process of patent abuse raises legal sarcasm to a fine art form. This is a legal hack of the first order.
;)
Whether it ought to be allowed or not is a different question, but it still brings tears to my eyes.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This might be a great thing for small software companies. At the moment, they can't possibly afford defensive patent portfolios. This makes them extremely vulnerable to malicious suits from big companies that want to squash them.
Being able to buy a slice of protection from IBM would eliminate one of the biggest risks that small developers face. Of course, small companies can't pay millions of dollars in legal fees. IBM will have to offer to defend their clients in court in order to make this work.
To er is human.
Possibly karma whoring, but I haven't heard the phrase deep six in a while and wondered where it came from.
That bastion of knowledge, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, says this:
This phrase is derived from the noun "deep six," meaning burial at sea and referring to the depth of water necessary for such a burial. The term was later used as slang for a grave (customarily six feet underground) and, by extension, as a verb meaning "to kill."
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Do realize ladies and gentlemen this is a bold and rather cavalier move on behalf of IBM. It's more tongue in cheek really, laughing at patent trolls and a majority of large corporations long bereft of the spirit of true competition.
It a rather elegant, subtle, and expensive way of inviting said patent trolls to "kiss my hairy ass". hehe
go go IBM
Hope is the currency of fools
1. A method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets, comprising:granting a privilege to a second party by a first party at time t1 to permit the second party to exercise the privilege upon the occurrence of a predetermined event occurring at time t2 where t2>t1, and wherein the exercise comprises obtaining an interest in one or more assets residing in a dynamic pool of assets comprised of assets from the portfolio of assets at time t2, wherein zero or more assets are in the dynamic pool at time t1 and said zero or more assets are not in the dynamic pool at time t2.
So a company has a pool of assets. It gives somebody else a right to in the future, after some event has occurred, gain one or more of those assets. Some of the assets may have left the pool by the time they do this. Basically, we're talking about the standard financial instrument known as an "option", but over any of a pool of assets rather over a specific asset.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the privilege is defined in a floating privilege agreement between the first and second parties, the floating privilege agreement having a term and specifying the predetermined event and the type of interest to be conveyed to the second party upon execution of the privilege.
The right can be time limited, and constrained to a certain kind of selection of assets.
3. The method of claim 2, wherein a number of assets in which the second party receives an interest is limited based on the floating privilege agreement.
The selection can be the number of assets acquired.
4. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets are intellectual property assets.
5. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are patents.
6. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are copyrights.
7. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are trade secrets.
Obvious.
8. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets include intellectual property assets selected from the group consisting of patents, copyrights and trade secrets.
But it doesn't have to be only IP. There can be other stuff as well.
9. The method of claim 4, wherein the privilege is exercised by the first party transferring rights in one or more of the assets in the dynamic pool of assets to the second party.
Pretty obvious, really.
10. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by assignment.
11. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by license.
12. The method of claim 11, wherein the license is an exclusive license.
OK, so there are multiple ways of transferring the rights.
13. The method of claim 4, wherein an occurrence of the predetermined event is a trigger event defined in the floating privilege agreement.
14. The method of claim 13, wherein the trigger event is a litigation-related event.
15. The method of claim 13 [sic, should clearly be 14], wherein the litigation-related event is a filing of a complaint against the second party.
16. The method of claim 15, wherein the complaint against the second party alleges that the second party infringes an intellectual property asset of a third party.
Now we get to the meat of the patent. This is not a patent on patent-trolling, it's a patent on a mechanism for defending against patent trolling. What they're patenting is a legal agreement that says "if you get sued for patent infringement, we'll grant you a patent license for one of our patents so you can smite the bastards".
17. The method of claim 13, wherein exercising the privilege comprises the second party selecting an asset from the dynamic pool of assets in response to occurrence of the trigger event.
18. The method of claim 17, wherein exercising the privilege further comprises the first party qualifying the selected asset for transfer to the second party to ensure the selected asset is appropriate for use by the second party f
Patents like this are proof that America has too many lawyers and MBAs and not enough engineers. Or maybe I'm just nostalgic for the good 'ole days when patents actually had to be material... a new and novel application of a technology or product feature that was a result of, you know, actual WORK originated by the person/company submitting the patent. This patent is basically a patent on a business type. It's kind of like patenting the concept of a bank, whereby you erect a building with a "vault" that allows "customers" to "withdraw" and "deposit" money. The American patent system is starting to exist primarily to employ lawyers... patent everything (no matter how stupid or obvious), and sue everybody.
This is a wonderful, delightful piece of work!
If this patent is to be successfully contested on the basis of prior art, some corporation is going to have to go public with the details of its patent protection racket. That company would be exposing itself to a lot of nasty business risks (possibly RICO, possibly anti-trust measures, more probably loss of sales and market cap, very definitely some image problems). I doubt that there are very many CEOs who would like the risk/benefit ratio of such a plan, especially as this kind of thing could break their personal career even if it is successful in blocking the patent.
If IBM is awarded the patent, it can use it to publicly expose the backroom details of the MS - SCO deal, the MS - Novell deal, and similar deals where there is good cause to suspect that some form of patent protection was involved. Through lawsuit and discovery, the secret clauses in those contracts would become public. This would stifle a lot of those kinds of activities, which would be a Good Thing for anyone favoring competition of products based on their technical merit.
IBM could also put the patent in the Linux patent protection pool. I cannot see anything negative for FOSS coming out of that.
But basically I see this patent as a way of demonstrating just how absurd the entire business model patent structure is.
Go IBM!