Microsoft Corp., McAfee Inc., and Symantec Corp. have joined the Defensive Patent Aggregation service offered by San Francisco-based RPX Corp. The moves bring RPX’s membership to 29, including Sharp Corporation and the U.S. subsidiary of Swedish telecommunications software and services company Enea. “Patents have long been viewed as a transactional problem, but in fact, for companies they really represent risk,” says John Amster, co-CEO of RPX. “In every other market, companies deal with risk through insurance of some form, but with patents, companies generally self-insure. RPX provides companies an alternative.”
RPX established the Defensive Patent Aggregation service 14 months ago to reduce patent assertion and litigation initiated by non-practicing entities (NPEs). These so-called “trolls” cost technology developers around the world billions of dollars annually by acquiring patents solely for the purpose of offensive licensing and litigation. RPX counters this problem by acquiring patent rights and providing them as a defensive patent aggregation for its member organizations, which pay annual fees ranging from $35,000 to $4.9 million, depending on size. To date, RPX has invested $130 million to acquire more than 1,000 U.S. and international patents and patent rights in the mobile, Internet search, telecommunications, networking, consumer electronics, and eCommerce sectors. In 2009, one out of every five of the 470 NPE cases filed involved software defendants.
Source: Enhanced Online News