Finding balance in an era of disruptive technologies by cross licensing patents.
Cross Licensing Patents
With the proliferation of patents, licensing is increasingly used to resolve issues between conflicting and competing patent owners. Cipher helps calculate what can be considered as fair for companies that seek rational and balanced outcomes by cross licensing patents.
On this page:
Jeremiah Chan, Head of Patents, Meta
If these are your questions…
How can I justify what represents a fair licensing deal?
Whether planning internally or negotiating, evidence trumps ‘gut feel’ every time. The Cipher Optimisation Model enables you to map your patents to the revenue of others, and similarly their patents to your revenue. This identifies where there is imbalance and a means to calculate the overall position.
What is our exposure to counter-assertion?
Where your strategy is to monetise your patents by licensing, it is vital to consider both the approach and the consequences. Cipher can identify companies who are exposed, and also help ‘war game’ the outcome of a cross-licence, in situations where the other party owns patent assets that map to your revenue.
What’s the best way of countering a demand for a portfolio licence?
It has become common practice for large, often failing companies, to take a blunderbuss approach to licensing. Such approaches are accompanied by a demand that you take a licence of their whole (and typically large) portfolio. Cipher enables rapid and effective whittling to patented technologies of relevance – normally a significantly smaller list.
…then Cipher can help.
How Cipher can model cross licensing
Define cross-licensing strategy
Define cross- licensing outcomes, such as threat neutralisation, monetisation and quantify impact on patent risk.
Build “balance of trade” model
Having identified potential licensing partners, model the likely financial outcomes.
Actionable Intelligence
Seek internal consensus, implement an evidence-based approach to negotiation, and justify outcomes.
Explore how Cipher can help you to…
Deep-dive into technologies
How can I quickly understand a new technology area?
Develop a cross-licensing strategy
How can I use data to strengthen my negotiations?
Want to find out more?
Explore other ways Cipher can help you with cross-licensing.
Jared Engstrom, Head of Patent Development, Red Hat
Allied Security Trust (AST)
AST provides to some of the world’s most innovative technology companies with patent risk mitigation services, including patent acquisition, and is an industry forum for IP leaders. In 2018, Cipher launched Cipher n/d Powered by AST, thereby incorporating the AST Product taxonomy into Cipher as an Industry Module to support cross-licensing negotiations.
We are always looking for innovative ways to make the patent markets more transparent and efficient and we believe that Cipher n/d is an important step towards a more comprehensive and standardized visualization of the patent landscape for the entire industry.
Russell W. Binns, CEO, AST
Mike Lee, Director, Head of Patents, Google
Cross Licensing FAQs
Can the “balance of trade” approach be used for other strategic patent decisions?
Why should a counter-party trust Cipher patent intelligence?
The reality is that a manual review of thousands of patents is impractical from a time and cost perspective. When relying on data generated from Cipher classifiers, you will have confidence in the results, which can be freely shared. This level of transparency is disarming.
Does this replace ‘pick lists’ and ‘claims charts’?
Not necessarily. While market practice is changing, some organisations combine financial models with conventional approaches including identification of small sets of patents (pick lists) that can be evidenced to be valid and infringed by the counterparty (claims charts). Relying on subsets of a portfolio to establish the quality of the entire portfolio is increasingly disregarded.
With Cipher you can also…
Why Cipher
Trained by humans, built by machine to give you independently verified accuracy
“Cipher’s classifiers enable you to understand the patent landscape or analyze a portfolio. Combining expertise in both IP and data science, Cipher provides you with solutions to the strategic problems patent owners face, with quick and accurate results.” Erik Oliver, Richardson Oliver Insights