Who Has Read 6,000 Nortel Patent Documents?
July 4, 2011
I know I haven’t, and my hunch is that not too many people in Harrod’s Creek have either.
I would, if I were a risk taker, wager that the purchasers of the Nortel intellectual property are taking the “pony in there” approach to these intellectual Augean stables. The idea is that if there are certain indications of a four hooved equine in a barn, there is probably one or more ponies around. The “certain indications” are the output of the pony. Nortel was a heck of a pony in the telecommunications sector, so the $4.5 billion bet of finding something of value in the Nortel output is hoped to be high.
You will want to read “Nortel Patents Go to Group that Includes Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and More.” The write up suggested to me that Google is the target of the consortium which now “owns” the Nortel intellectual property.
But the task is to understand the scope of the claims within this corpus of patent documents. The “pony in there” is going to have to be found, and that will take time, money, and considerable effort.
The problem on this sultry day in Kentucky is that most people are not reading the Nortel patent documents. At some point, legal eagles with many “interns” and others who can sit for hours to demonstrate the value of their training will work through the documents. Even with the plump payrolls of Microsoft, Apple, and the other members of the consortium now owning the Nortel intellectual property, grinding through 6,000 patent documents is a tough business. Nortel’s engineers and scientists rambled across high speed wireless, networking, mobile devices, semiconductors, and related fields. More than in house lawyers and the consortium’s attorneys are going to be needed to:
- Ingest the patents
- Analyze the claims
- Match the claims against possible infringements
- Determine which alleged infringements warrant legal action.
Augean stables’ dwellers. A big job indeed. Source: http://marksadams.blogspot.com/2007/09/use-your-allusion-4-cleaning-augean.html
Big job. Google has about 650 patents. The candidates for alleged infringement must be reanalyzed in light of Google’s patent documents. Work and more work.
Let’s assume that one wants to read these 6,000 documents, figure out the technical issues, and perform the ranking of the Nortel patents most likely to be an issue for Google. The consortium can just be 1,000 patent attorneys and give each attorney six Nortel patents to read. Then each attorney can write a short opinion document and forward them to the legal team which can sift through the 6,000 pages of opinions.
An old fashioned approach to use traditional online commercial patent document service such as Lexis, Derwent or Questel, or poke around for a service such as Patents Online. The fact is that patent information is quite abundant. There is the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the USPTO. There are also abundant free sources as well; for example, Pat2PDF.org. Online research can help trim the document set down to size.
In the good old, pre IPO days of Manning & Napier, the company had a sophisticated system and method for processing patent documents and presenting relationships of such key components as the claims within specific documents. You can turn to IBM’s Delphion system or license sophisticated text mining software from Digital Reasoning. There are short cuts to patent analysis, but, based on my watching patent attorneys at work, humans are going to be needed.
So where does one turn once the online and “smart” systems ingest 6,000 Nortel patents? Smart software is great but for some jobs, humans still work well.
I did some poking around and learned about a quite interesting firm, Article One Partners. The company offers a platform that enables a group of specialists to respond to requests for research in the patent community. The company says:
The worldwide patent system is no longer keeping pace with the increasing volume of patent applications, resulting in unnecessary and costly delays and the issuance of overly broad, non-original patents.
The company has a pool of “researchers” who can perform the specialized work Article One Partners’ worldwide clientele requires.
What I found interesting is that as soon as the Nortel deal was rumored in the spring of 2011, Article One Partners posted “Google Bids $900 Million for Nortel Patent Portfolio.” In that write up, Article One Partners reported:
Google recently submitted a bid of $900 million dollars in cash for Canadian telecom-equipment maker Nortel Networks’ patent portfolio. The official bidding will occur in June during a bankruptcy auction, and approximately 6,000 patents and patent applications will collectively be up for sale. The patent collection covers everything from wireless technology to semiconductors.
The key point is that Article One Partners was one of the first of the firms in the patent space to provide information about this deal.
In June 2011, as it turned out, Google chose not to match the $4.5 billion a consortium bid. I did enjoy its bid for the value of pi rounded, however.
For those wanting to make sense of 6,000 patents, use the online services and the software systems from Digital Reasoning and similar firms. Just remember to keep humans in the loop. If you don’t have enough attorneys on staff or retainer to crunch through the Nortel documents, keep ArticleOnePartners.com in mind. I would blend smart software, online tools, and humans of the Article One Partners variety. Humans are pretty good at pattern recognition and can spot a pony in the Augean stables stuffed with Nortel PDFs.
Software is great, just not the total answer to search, analysis, and judgment about the Nortel patent corpus. Sorry, search vendors. You can’t do the full job—yet.
Stephen E Arnold, July 4, 2011
Another 4th of July freebie.
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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$900 million for more than 6,000 patents! The software giant is planning a big leap over Google by claiming thousands of Nortel patents under the current sale terms.