Value of IP

Occam Capital was created to invest on European Intellectual Property (IP). One question I frequently get is about the real value of IP (ie, let’s get real its worth nothing...) or on the political front on the morality of the whole thing (we European should be against the whole patenting process which is nothing but a tool of American imperialism...)
I got this short brief today by mail:

Microsoft Corporation4,6 (MSFT, $27.46, Outperform)

Microsoft intends to file for over 3,000 patents in F2005, up from just over 2,000 in F2004 and fewer than 1,000 in F2000. The vast increase in Microsoft’s patent portfolio will limit the grounds for future infringement lawsuits against the company, indemnify customers against third-party attacks and provide Microsoft with a significant asset base to leverage through licensing programs. Microsoft is unlikely to use its patents to attack Linux, although a recent study suggests it might have grounds to do so.

Brendan Barnicle 503.727.0624 [email protected]

Good illustration from my perspective on
- IP has value and large corporation are aggressively investing
- Companies like Thomson Multimedia or IBM have historical generated significant revenue stream from their patent portfolio
- As a VC, the legal due diligence on the value of the IP portfolio of a potential investee company is a crucial part of any pre-investment work

=> What we really need are publicly available IP landscape maps that describe for a given domain what has been patented by who...

interesting blog on same topic:
Charles Hudson

Marc.

Comments

[laurent edel]

salut marc,
on a démarré notre blog le meme jour je crois
tu es a londres? tu as réussi a monter ton fond, bravo!
fais signe si tu passes par paris
cu
laurent

[Azeem]

publically availble? Shouldn't they be proprietary?

[Jeff Clavier]

Some of those maps were actually produced by Aureka(tm), a software solution built by Aurigin, a company the Reuters Greenhouse Fund (of which Marc and I were partners) had invested back in 1998. In 2002, the company was bought by Information Holdings (NYSE:IHI), which is itself being acquired by Thomson Corporation (Toronto:TOC).
The capability was somehow limited, but did display a map of what had been patented in a given field, based on USPTO, EPO and WIPO data.