Patent Scoring for Protection against Patent Trolls

A large number of companies are suffering from the Patent Troll menace. In a recent news item, titled "Local firms suffer patent suits", several Korean majors such as Samsung and LG have been reported to be among the top victims of offensive suits by Patent Trolls.

One way for large corporations to protect themselves against patent trolls may be to preempt such an attack. A reliable and tested patent scoring methodology may be able to provide the top 3%-5% of patents in a classification, say the US Classification (USC). This will enable an analyst to discover the assignees of those patents. Such an analysis should result in the identification of holders of key IP in a given area.

As an example, I have been reading about the Typhoon Touch Technologies patent US5,379,057 being used for suits against a whole lot of companies such as Samsung, Nokia, Motion Computing Inc., Electrovaya Inc. and Xplore Technologies Corp., Apple Inc., Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp., Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., Lenovo (United States) Inc., Panasonic Corp. of North America, HTC America Inc., Palm Inc., Samsung Electronics America Inc., Nokia Inc. and LG Electronics USA Inc.

Upon querying this patent in a scoring system developed by my team, I discovered that is a very highly scored patent with a score of 69.04 according to our system. This places the patent in the top 3% of the patents in its US class (all digits) and the patent's score is more than 2 standard deviations away from the mean. Such a company and the patent could have been uncovered in a periodic analysis of the key areas of practice for the company.

This is just one of the potential use of a patent scoring mechanism. As they say, better safe than sorry, and that appears to especially true when dealing with the Patent Troll menace!