Technicolor’s chief IP officer Arvin Patel will depart the French firm to take up the same post at media and entertainment tech company TiVo. Deirdre Leane – perhaps best known as former head of controversial patent monetisation business IPNav – will take over much of Patel’s role at Technicolor.
Just over two months ago, the IAM Market Knowledge Centre reported on Texan NPE Longhorn IP’s acquisition of several patents from an unnamed Chinese telecoms company.
WiLAN announced last week that it will shift from being a patent pure play to become a diversified holding company, enabling it to invest in businesses beyond IP monetisation. While the Canadian NPE is not exiting the scene altogether, its move represents another blow for the secondary market after Intellectual Ventures (IV) confirmed the cessation of its patent buying activities earlier this month.
Intellectual Ventures (IV) has confirmed to IAM Magazine that it is winding down acquisitions for its most recently established patent aggregation fund. The impending exit of the patent market’s top buyer could have a significant impact on pricing and deal flow in the wider marketplace.
Patent pool operator Via Licensing has introduced extensive royalty rate changes for its Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) offerings, as it continues to test out innovative strategies aimed at increasing licence uptake among a new generation of Asian smartphone and tablet makers.
When we discuss Chinese companies on the IAM Market blog, more often than not we are talking about them as buyers of patents, rather than sellers. But a recent sale of patents by a major Chinese telecoms company could prove to be one of the year’s most significant deals so far.
In a major deal announced last week Intellectual Ventures (IV) will transfer over 1,000 patent families that had originally been assigned to Kodak to Dominion Harbor.
IAM Market has just welcomed two of the world’s biggest high-tech players to its patent and technology transactions portal.
The latest rights holders to join the platform are Microsoft and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, bringing the total number of IAM Market vendors to 22. Both are major patent owners, with significant global portfolios and extensive experience in monetising IP assets.
In a sign of just how tough and unpredictable the monetisation market has become, three of the biggest names in the game reported a drop in annual patent-related revenues during 2016.
It has often been said that as US courts, legislators and lobbyists make it progressively difficult to enforce and license patents in the country, rights holders will turn their attentions to foreign markets like China in order to monetise their IP portfolios. In doing so, however, many patent owners will need to adopt different tactical approaches. Two developments in recent weeks suggest that, at least for some IP owners, this strategic shift is already in full swing.