The ABA Journal is reporting (via Bloomberg) that a former partner at law firm Kirkland and Ellis has purchased 4,500 patents and is starting an NPE (or troll, depending on your attitude towards these things).
John Desmarais is a “Billion Dollar Lawyer” (according to Bloomberg) who practiced (what else?) patent litigation. So he’s flipped sides from working for operating companies to becoming a “non-practicing entity” himself. The patents come from Micron Technologies, so presumably the majority lie in the computer memory space though apparently he bought some that cover “photo imaging, telecommunications and search engine technology, plus the largest single cluster of radio frequency identification [RFID] patents.”
The 4,500 number sounds crazily high for a first purchase, but I’m guessing this is just patents and not 4,500 patent families, though I suppose with Micron you never know (especially as the Bloomberg article also mentions 800 patents). The difference is that patents are inherently national rights, and so one patent filed in your home jurisdiction and then filed in a whole slew of foreign jurisdictions results in multiple patents. The whole thing – all the individual national patents related to a single patented technology – form a “patent family”.
The deal is structured with a patent holding company that will use Desmarais’s new law firm for its enforcement work. The patent holding company, Round Rock Research LLC, is according to Patent Freedom now the second largest NPE. The largest is of course Intellectual Ventures.
I’m assuming Desmarais must have got some sort of investment to get going with this, but given his background, maybe not? It sounded like Micron needed some cash, and maybe he cut them in on a percentage of licensing revenues to get a better deal? Just speculation of course, but one to watch.
I’m also wondering what his plans are for Europe?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh joy, another troll is born. I would like to see the introduction of compulsory blanket licensing of patents held by NPE’s. We need to limit the damage these parasites can inflict on our economy.
I share Andre’s concern. Yet another troll, yet another toll and tax to pay in an already complex market. The compulsary license idea is one I share, after all, no troll ever wants to put his targets out of business, only to optimise the fee payable. Even better, a compulsary license with the tariff objectively set….similar to the way that the Copyright Tribunal sets PRS and PPL tarriffs. That way we all know where we stand and can safely predict what tax we have to pay (like tax we can even accrue safely for it) as opposed to not knowing how much in lawyers fees to set aside. It should not take too much brain power to set the right market rate for the right market conditions. And it takes away the uncertainty.
Thank goodness that trolls are a feature of the US market and that the legal environment in Europe is not so encouraging as in the US.