Category: News

Patent Tokenization: NFTs Break into Intellectual Property

“The current process requires lawyers, contracts, a lot of paperwork, now by using NFTs the whole model is simplified”

Lavinia Meliti, IPwe’s Global Head of Business Development, was interviewed by Bloomberg Línea about how IPwe’s Smart Pools are striving to encourage adoption of emerging technologies, such as Blockchain and the Metaverse.

IPwe focuses on emerging technologies where tech leaders can contribute patents to, to further generate revenue, and SMEs can join for a small yearly subscription, to acquire the licenses needed to enter an emerging technology market at a feasible price point.

IPwe aims to remove all barriers to innovation for SMEs. With a smart IP strategy, backed by the expertise of an AI and blockchain-powered company like IPwe, SMEs have an opportunity to level up the playing field. They can enjoy easier access to groundbreaking patents, letting them pursue innovation efforts that are affordable and potentially lucrative.

To read the English version of the original article written by Daniel Salazar Castellanos, please visit Bloomberg Línea.

About IPwe
IPwe is the world’s first global innovation platform leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. Through the IPwe Platform, large enterprises, SMEs, owners, those looking to enhance their innovation profiles and those with a legal, technical or financial focus benefit from IPwe’s mission to empower innovation in emerging technologies. IPwe is committed to improving ROI whether measured by dollar returns, jobs created, ventures launched, or problems solved by increasing transparency, lowering costs and enhancing returns for the entire innovation ecosystem.

AI-Powered Patent Pools Open for Business

“Recently launched patent pools, IPwe and Alium, have both made AI a central part of their offerings, but critics claim the technology is still too immature to add value”

In IAM’s recent article about IPwe’s Smart Pool program, Jonas Block, IPwe’s Head of Product Management, predicted that many other patent pools will begin to implement AI technology to faster examine patent quality at a vastly lower price. “What we will see is that AI will help to reduce the noise and just focus on the few patents – the core patents that matter. I also hope that AI brings SMEs into the game” said Jonas. IPwe has invested over $40 million dollars into the Smart Pool program’s AI technology that has been perfected since its initial development in 2007.

The article went into further detail about how IPwe’s Smart Pool program focuses on emerging technologies, such as the metaverse. By using IPwe’s core AI engine, the pool’s patents can be evaluated at a low cost to produce a quality report. This quality report allows the pools to require a specific quality threshold. This innovative quality ranking system not only allows the pools to filter out inferior patents but also incentivizes large companies to pledge patents of the highest quality to the pool, as the pool’s revenue shares are appropriated not by the mass of patents pledged to the pool but by the quality of such patents.

Utilizing AI technologies in patent pools will not replace a detailed analysis a lawyer would do, but drives the costs down for patents in emerging technologies, ultimately allowing SMEs and start-ups the opportunity to join IPwe’s Smart Pools at little to no cost. “The cost of filing for patents is already prohibitive for many small businesses, and if you tell them they need an additional $30,000 in legal fees to join a patent pool, many “would just say ‘I’m out’,” said Jonas.

To read the original article in IAM, written by Angela Morris, please visit https://www.iam-media.com/patent-pools/ai-powered-patent-pools-open-business-despite-some-market-scepticism.

About IPwe
IPwe is the world’s first global innovation platform leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. Through the IPwe Platform, large enterprises, SMEs, owners, those looking to enhance their innovation profiles and those with a legal, technical or financial focus benefit from IPwe’s mission to empower innovation in emerging technologies. IPwe is committed to improving ROI whether measured by dollar returns, jobs created, ventures launched, or problems solved by increasing transparency, lowering costs and enhancing returns for the entire innovation ecosystem.

Research on Innovation and Intellectual Property

IPwe China’s research, which was co-written with the Shandong Financial Assets Exchange Center, on Innovation Models for Intellectual Property Pledge Financing for Sci-tech Innovation Enterprises was published in Shandong Social Science Forum’s Science Innovation Finance Reform and Development Paper Collection.

This monumental publication was announced on December 7th at the Science and Innovation Finance Reform and Development Forum in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province.  This forum focused on issues such as financial support for the development of scientific and technological innovation enterprises and the construction of scientific and technological innovation financial reform pilot zones that IPwe China’s research was the basis for.

IPwe’s technology empowers banks through an extremely low-cost and extremely efficient artificial intelligence system so that banks can screen pledges, and further help banks actively screen and find high-quality intellectual property loan applicants. This approach has been accepted by the European Patent Office in EPC countries and used to produce an official annual report on European High-growth Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and Intellectual Property Rights.

Participation at the 2021 Shandong Entrepreneur Forum

On December 14, the Shandong Entrepreneur Forum was held at Shandong Institute of Industrial Technology (SDIIT) to discuss financing and market value enhancement of intellectual property operations. The forum focused on the current domestic and international macroeconomic situation and the development trend of Shandong’s industries. Well-known experts, scholars and business executives were invited to discuss developments in the technology industry and give insight on the capital market’s direction.

At the event, Sun Dianyi, director of Shandong Institute of Industrial Technology (SDIIT), pointed out that artificial intelligence’s integration into social management and green development has become the most relevant emerging technology through its positive influence on the climate. Sun Dianyi stated that companies must accelerate such technological breakthroughs and innovation that will spur ecological construction.

In his speech, IPwe China President, Henry Wang, focused on how to assist technology-based small and medium-sized enterprises in both equity financing and intellectual property pledge financing through the management and operation of intellectual property rights with modern technology.

Mr. Wang stated that IPwe has achieved world-leading results in patent monetization and patent industrialization. The research and development of IPwe’s technology stack; artificial intelligence, blockchain, patent clustering, patent evaluation model, predictive analytics technology, expert-random-walker-with-restart (ERWR) technology, etc., can greatly reduce various costs related to patent operation as the degree of automation, accuracy and efficiency have been greatly improved. Mr. Wang also shared several of IPwe’s recent successful cases to help companies use intellectual property rights in equity financing and pledge financing.

Finally, Professor Huang Weiping of the Renmin University of China, a well-known economist and the first dean of the School of Economics, gave a speech on the worldwide macroeconomic situation in 2022. From the perspective of development economics and comparative economics, Professor Huang reviewed the historical changes in the relationship between the developed countries and the catching-up countries and looked forward to the future economic development of China. He emphasized that innovation is still the shortcoming of many companies, and technology companies must make up for the shortcomings of innovation and strive to promote industrial development.

Entrepreneurial Training Camp

IPwe China was invited to join the Star Mentor Group to assist the Cloud Crossing Project entrepreneurial training camp with intellectual property evaluation and analysis. The training camp will use powerful resources to encourage innovative entrepreneurial projects and assist the technological growth trend.

The Cloud Crossing Project is a complementary action for the China International “Internet+” University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Contest, which is jointly sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Education, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and the State Intellectual Property Office, among other nation-level organizations. The contest has been held for seven consecutive years and has created over 6 million innovative entrepreneurial projects.

To build up a post-contest and sustainable support system, strengthen the cultivation and incubation of contest projects, and accelerate the industrialization and growth of high-quality projects, the contest center has decided to organize and carry out the “Cloud Crossing Program” –  a high-growth project training camp, since 2022. The purpose of the program is to give participants full access to the resources of Beijing Zhongguancun Science Park and other resources made available by the Chinese government, relevant industries, high caliber academia and research, as well as financial, intermediary and media resources. The Cloud Crossing Program also mobilizes several leading enterprises, unites regional governments, organizes investment firms, to support contest projects that ultimately comprehensively improve the level of post-contest services and aid in the rapid growth of Cloud Crossing projects.

Henry Wang, president of IPwe China, is one of the first 6 invited star mentors to help innovators access complete intellectual property coverage for their inventions and technological innovations.

About IPwe

IPwe is the first platform for blockchain-enabled IP transactions. IPwe combines the complexity of IP with the intelligence of AI and Blockchain to bring better information and more transparency to the patent space. The IPwe Platform is multi-sided and functions as a marketplace serving the innovation ecosystem, where information and analytics can be obtained without charge and IP transactions can be completed at the lowest possible cost. IPwe is committed to improving innovation ROI whether measured by dollar returns, jobs created, ventures launched, or problems solved by increasing transparency, lowering costs, and enhancing returns for the benefit of the entire innovation ecosystem.

As a patent owner or a company driving innovation, you more than likely spend a bit of time researching or filling IP to protect ideas. Once granted, the value of a patent lies in the ability to generate a return for your work in contributing to the innovation cycle. Typically, these assets can be monetized by enforcing your rights through patent litigation, or by licensing or selling your patents to others. Other IP owners find themselves on the other side of the coin and feel there is no need for monetization – only the need for defensive IP protection (where return-on-invest is generated by securing their own products and services).

While monetization and protection are typically the final intent with IP, we often overlook the full story of what IP can tell us. Patents can show us the R&D efforts of specific players and where their focus lies for new technology or products. They also can be used as a metric to identify when specific markets are going to take off or slow down. Patents also tell us when companies fail, since owners file for inventions thinking they are new but in reality are not. This happens all the time and lives in public records in patent offices worldwide. IP is more than legal documents used to protect ideas, they serve as a map to when and how society will be innovating.

It is important to remember IP protects inventions, not products. Companies may be doing business in the US but the patents may cover an invention all over the world. IP protects technological features beyond the product itself. For example, an owner who has IP or a heating system begins to apply and sell toasters in the US. Then begins to integrate the patented heating system to ovens, then into cars, and continue developing new businesses because they own the technology through the patents.

If you want to understand what your competition is developing or where they plan to break into, use patents as your primary indicator. The patents your competitors are filing might as well be a magic arrow pointing you in the direction of their strategy.  Whether that arrow is pointing to a new product, a new focus, a new strategy, a new partnership, or even a whole new market; patents do not lie. An obvious and recent example is Facebook (Meta). In 2020, Facebook was identified as showing the most patent-related growth in the area of Optical Elements relating to Head’s Up Display IP or VR.[1] It was clear Facebook was making this transition and putting a lot of resources into making sure they would dominate the AR/VR space. And now a year and a half later, Zuckerberg has announced Meta, a metaverse platform aimed at creating social connection through AR/VR, and no one should have been surprised.

Patents are useful in indicating market trajectory or when a technology area is going to break out or even lose steam. It is important to keep in mind not all technology is patentable, and the number of assets can show what areas a company is trying to protect. Looking at the volume of IP and the number of players is useful in determining what emerging technologies are seeing traction and which ones are not being adopted. IP trends can also point to when technology is going through an “update” or when new patents are substituting on old patents, rendering them obsoleteBeing able to identify the number of patents filed in a field or identifying the organizations filling those assets, you can predict which markets are attempting to innovate and which organizations are leading the charge.

According to the European Patent Office, in 2020 we saw a surge in patents relating to medical technology. Med-tech accounted for the highest number of new IP fillings surpassing digital communications from the previous year.[2] While this stat is directly related to the circumstances bought on by COVID-19, the underlying fact is the company who filed the most assets, Johnson & Johnson, was one of the main vaccine developers. The med-tech research and studies done during the past year and a half are going to continue to lead to medical innovation and advancements in the form of new drugs, new devices, and new procedures.

Patents should be seen as an organization’s strongest asset. They protect ideas, they create new revenue, and they validate a company’s value.

IP data will always be the guide for innovation in both patent holders’ objectives and the market’s overall direction. However, creating a strong patent portfolio is not an easy task. While patent data is public information there have been difficulties in comprehending the necessary data due to the sheer amount. Just looking at the U.S., in 2020, a total number of 399,055 patents were granted at the USPTO – an increase from 182,218 in 2000. [3] The number of assets will continue to grow as humans continue to innovate and as technologies continue to become more complex. If individuals were able to efficiently understand this amount of patent data, you might be able to make these decisions in a timely matter to adjust your strategy to stay ahead of the curve.

Typically to understand this information you would need to read hundreds of patent documents, or hire an industry expert to break down the information. This is not a problem for enterprise-sized accounts that have the resources to afford these huge inefficiencies. While the “strategy” is often file first and ask later, most companies do not have the methods to design an efficient strategy to maximize value. Due to this, portfolios become large over time and are filled with patents that end up producing no value. This task of keeping up with patent trends and large portfolios can seem nearly impossible for some SMEs or Universities who do not have access to additional recourses and whose focus is to create or innovate through their technology.

One way to help in evaluating assets and in fully understanding the story patents tell is by leveraging Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our platform combines our battle-tested Artificial Intelligence, years of transactional data, and algorithms to create a clear story of patent data. IPwe offers the information and tools to help our clients identify, research, evaluate and transact their patents.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-01-14/facebook-piling-up-patents-augmented-reality-push

[2] https://www.epo.org/about-us/annual-reports-statistics/statistics/2020/statistics/patent-applications.html#medical

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/256571/number-of-patent-grants-in-the-us/

Author: Franklin Bruscianelli, Director of Sales Operations

Franklin Bruscianelli’s experience comes from his years at IPwe. He works directly with patent owners and has a strong understanding of the problems and inefficiencies they face. By leveraging emerging technologies and the IPwe team’s experience, Franklin empowers owners of all sizes with new ways to understand and extract value from their patents.

About IPwe

IPwe is quickly emerging as creating the industry standard for patent NFTs. IPwe recently announced its partnership with IBM to represent patents as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). IPwe also has a partnership with CasperLabs  to further improve the patent registration process and create a chain of custody (CoC) Solution by using the Casper public blockchain to store, secure, and trace patent data, thereby creating a new approach to patent ownership verification. Patent NFTs are stored and shared on the IPwe Platform, running on the IBM Cloud and Blockchain services such as the Casper Network. IPwe anticipates tokenized IP to become commercially available in Q4 of 2021. IPwe operates in more than 50 countries with offices in Asia, Europe, North and South America. To learn more about how IPwe can provide the answers to your IP-related business decisions, Request a Demo of the IPwe Platform on www.ipwe.com.

There is no doubt that we are at the beginning of a transformative time for technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the world as we know it. Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence are set to radically change multiple industries and the patent ecosystem is no exception. Using these emerging technologies to register, manage, assess, and transact patents, opens a new horizon for the implementation of patent strategies. In the past, fundamental limitations and lack of answers resulted in unused patent assets, missed opportunities, and a waste of internal resources. Thanks to recent technological improvements, deploying a comprehensive patent strategy is achievable and owners can finally fully maximize their patent value no matter how you choose to do that—be it adoption, commercialization, monetization or other metrics traditionally associated with asset management and every other asset on your balance sheet.

It is estimated that intangible assets represent around 80% of the value of the S&P 500 [1].  For most startups and technological SMEs, this percentage might be closer to representing  almost the entirety of the company’s value. Because of the type of protection and rights they grant, patents are the strongest type of IP among those intangible assets. In a crowded and fierce technological market, patents protect inventions, provide solutions to technical problems, and allow for the quantification, evaluation, and use of innovation as a competitive and cooperative tool.  Moreover, the current information age brings about a vast spread of technical knowledge and almost unlimited access by anybody from (almost) anywhere to the ideas, technologies, and company products being developed and commercialized all around the globe. This is driving the need for companies to have a vision for global patent strategy now more than ever.

The use of patents or their relevance for a company’s business has been extremely limited and inefficient due to, among other factors, the low quality of patent data, the impossibility to manage and extract (almost any) insight from patents, and the high costs associated with patent tasks. Underused assets are thus a result of the inability to assess in a meaningful and systematic way the strength and competitive position of patents. So much so, that quite often patents have been avoided altogether or filed for the sake of owning a given quantity of them, and a patent strategy has meant filing without a purpose beyond protecting some technical features of those technologies and products developed in-house, while barely dedicating any attention on the asset’s protection value or future exploitation. What this really means is no consideration for building a patent portfolio that has the potential of strengthening market competitive position, fostering, and even creating new business.

Another common issue arises from those patents that have been long forgotten and suddenly revisited within the company, often as a last resort to produce income. Unfortunately, in these cases, only a small number of portfolios can generate any kind of revenue because no substantial patent strategy was initially deployed so it becomes increasingly difficult that these patents, thought-out mostly for defensive purposes, end up having value beyond their in-house use. A second cause is the deficit of in-depth insight on the portfolio, its features and relations to other similar patent protections and market products. This lack of in-depth insight prevents sellers and licensors from accessing the full range of available opportunities, the most suitable path to a successful adoption, commercialization, or monetization, and how to best present to potential buyers, licensees and partners why they should acquire, license or cooperate regarding that specific patented technology.

Now AI-based patent analytics enable a much deeper assessment of the strength of both individual patents and portfolios, regardless of their size. They also provide a portfolio’s patent landscape, which reveals not only how this portfolio is positioned presently, but how new filings or acquisitions could claim new areas of protection that improve its scope and value in the future. In addition, the determination of a portfolio’s patent position supports and makes efficient the thorough analysis of the relationships between the intangible and related market products or services, which defines one of the key factors of patent value: market relevance.

Maximizing value of a patent portfolio is not only about monetizing patents. Patents are complex assets that are difficult for even patent experts to comprehend. For this reason, a good patent strategy must first be able to make the patent asset accessible. When the characteristics of a portfolio and its benefits can be successfully shown so that anybody can grasp them in a general business understanding, the portfolio can start producing value [2]. Patents can substantially impact the capacity of a business for attracting investment or increase its stock pricing since the market and investors can better evaluate the worth of the company’s innovation.

Once this kind of sound knowledge of a portfolio is achieved and turned into insight, following a comprehensive approach for patent strategy, the use of its patent assets can be exploited to its full extent: the ability to identify and proceed with patent-specific strategies, enhanced adoption, commercialization and monetization, filing and acquisition strategies, the assessment of patent-related risk mitigation by detecting potential threats or actively pursuing business opportunities, support of patent-based funding, insurance and much more.

In the new horizon, patent strategies should be dedicated to making patents accessible while expanding protection value in a wide array of solutions. There it is time for patents to be all they can be.

^[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/intangible-assets-driver-company-value/

[2] https://www.lexorbis.com/top-4-ways-patents-can-skyrocket-your-companys-valuation/

Author: Raúl Diaz Morales, Vice President, Patent Advisory Services

Raul Diaz Morales’ experience in the patent business is profound, previously managing multidisciplinary teams in IP firms in Europe and always enjoying being at the intersection where business, technology and patent law meet. Now more than ever, Raul looks forward to finding projects and also new ways to utilize his extensive IP knowledge with patents, technology and helping IPwe’s clients find an innovative edge.

About IPwe

IPwe is quickly emerging as creating the industry standard for patent NFTs. IPwe recently announced its partnership with IBM to represent patents as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). IPwe also has a partnership with CasperLabs  to further improve the patent registration process and create a chain of custody (CoC) Solution by using the Casper public blockchain to store, secure, and trace patent data, thereby creating a new approach to patent ownership verification. Patent NFTs are stored and shared on the IPwe Platform, running on the IBM Cloud and Blockchain services such as the Casper Network. IPwe anticipates tokenized IP to become commercially available in Q4 of 2021. IPwe operates in more than 50 countries with offices in Asia, Europe, North and South America. To learn more about how IPwe can provide the answers to your IP-related business decisions, Request a Demo of the IPwe Platform on www.ipwe.com. 

Traditional patent pools have helped change how we approach patent licensing and monetization. Importantly, they are in legal and business compliance with government and industry standards. The central idea behind patent pooling was to provide an efficient route towards licensing for technology implementers, while collectively rewarding the innovation of patent holders. However, given the high and inefficient costs in which the administrators of traditional patent pools economically prevail over participants, the model for patent pools is ripe for change.

With the increasing complexity and interoperability of modern innovation, patent pooling needs to do much more than just bundling patents and sharing licensing revenue.

For context, the modern smartphone consists of nearly 250,000 distinct patents.[1] 5G technology, which is only a small part of smartphone functionality, is expected to add an estimated 30,000 patents [2] to the fray. Fully unlocking the value of these interconnected patents requires more than just a patent ledger on a worksheet and payment links. It calls for smart patent management, and that’s where IPwe’s Smart Pools come into play.

What are IPwe’s Smart Pools?

IPwe’s Smart Pool is an intelligent program that delivers the benefit of exponential technologies to innovators that want to encourage adoption, maximize business opportunities, and generate a return on their investment, while maintaining maximum flexibility to change direction as future business and market conditions dictate. Like traditional patent pools, Smart Pools consist of two key groups: Founding Members (i.e., patent contributors) who agree to bundle their patent rights – without losing patent ownership – and Members (i.e., licensees), who take a license to the patents contributed to the pool, at an agreed-upon price.

Traditionally, patent pools functioned as a means of facilitating access to interconnected patent technology – a one-stop-shop. But many innovations involve an ecosystem of complementary patents. Some of these patents might be critical to the implementation of innovations, while others are enabled by the sum of its parts. Smart Pools allow the monetization of these patents without the need to pursue licensing on a one-to-one basis and the exorbitant expense that this might entail.

Traditional patent pools are incentivized to allay a fear of patent litigation; but they also encompass high fees and narrow focus and are inefficient in their ability to expand the licensing opportunities available to patent holders. Instead, in a world of more and more complex innovations, patent holders require tools that help them better understand their IP, license them in more innovative ways, and derive higher value from their monetization. Thanks to IPwe’s Smart Pools, they can benefit from a more efficient process that reduces transaction costs and enables a better structured and more coherent licensing strategy. Smart Pools provide cutting edge tools that help patent holders and implementers enjoy these benefits and more.

Why are they important?

Prolific institutions and corporate organizations frequently maintain a portfolio of tens to thousands of active patents. The process of combining and efficiently extracting the value of these patents through licensing is often expensive and inefficient. For instance, patent pools rely on incredible human effort to maintain licensing and revenue sharing activity – often at a cost of millions of dollars yearly. [3] This expense typically contributes to higher licensing costs which are then passed on to licensees.

IPwe’s Smart Pools introduce a more efficient, tech-enabled process that saves on the annual costs of pool maintenance. They ensure that innovators can sidestep the need to build expensive licensing structures, while earning revenue that fuels innovation instead. With these cost savings, patent holders can offer more competitive licensing prices, which can in turn facilitate broader adoption and license saturation.

In addition, Smart Pools provide both patent holders and implementers with the tools they need to make the most of their patent portfolio. These organizations often do not have efficient tools to manage their patents’ assets, and very few entities have the means and expertise to create such tools.

Due to IPwe’s proprietary algorithms and success data, including 14-year accumulating analytics and data – at an investment of $40 million – Smart Pools provide advanced analytics and data-oriented insights that help organizations identify, research, evaluate, and transact in patents. With the AI tools that Smart Pools provide, organizations can easily learn where their patents are best utilized, historical licensing data, and all the information they need to improve productivity for increased transactions and investment. The IPwe Platform productizes Erich Spangenberg’s previous IP strategies in selecting and taking principal positions in companies based on their IP value.  Erich and the IPwe team have earned companies $2.5+ billion.

What are the benefits for patent holders and licensees?

– Lower transaction costs: AI makes pool management easier, removing all of the inefficiencies that drive costs upwards. As a result, more licensees can enjoy access to the bundled patents at competitive rates that preserve their ability to profit from implementation efforts. Two broad areas in which Smart Pools provide an advantage to are search costs and negotiation costs:

– Search costs: Due to the fragmented and incomplete information that patent registries typically include, identifying issued patents is often tasking. Because patents typically use ambiguous titles, and new patents are being issued constantly, implementers require a coherent database that provides a complete and updated list of applicable patents.[4] In Smart Pools, IPwe not only publishes a comprehensive list of included patents and identities of their owners, but also provides detailed references on how each patent is related to the underlying technology.

– Negotiation costs: Innovation is increasingly compared to attempting to climb a pyramid. Each level consists of underlying patents that makes each succeeding innovation possible. However, for sequential innovators to improve on existing processes, they must often negotiate numerous licenses with preexisting patent owners and this likely results in higher licensing fees.[5] Smart Pools remove this barrier to innovation by enabling a single bundled license that benefits from the efficiency gains of a tech-enabled process and its resultant competitive pricing.

– Broader monetization base: Although patent holders wield considerable influence over the patent pooling process, they are not all created equal. Compared to large corporations that can monetize their patents on their own through mass production and implementation, other institutions like SMEs do not have this luxury. To facilitate this mission, IPwe gives SMEs the unprecedented opportunity to get free membership in its Smart Pools, which means free access to top industry patent portfolios, but also peace of mind that high litigation fees will not encompass SMEs’ funding and revenue, while allowing their proprietary ideas to be protected. Full and unfettered access to the Smart Pools’ technology for SMEs is a foundational design of this offering.

– Transparency: IPwe’s Smart Pools implement cutting edge tools based on blockchain and NFT technology to introduce greater transparency and ease into the patent licensing process. All licensing transactions on our platform occur through NFTs which allows patent and licensing information to be centralized in one place. This slashes discovery costs and helps mitigate the risk that some patent information might slip through the cracks.

– Adoption and Innovation: Smart Pools help facilitate faster adoption in tech areas that are very early in the adoption cycle, where there hasn’t been a significant amount of licensing activity. By providing access to cutting-edge technologies on standard terms, Smart Pools drive further innovation in two ways: first, the Pool’s revenue incentivizes and funds the Founding Members’ R&D; second, a single license to a wide patent portfolio encourages implementers to adopt new technologies, safe in the knowledge that they will have access to IP at a transparent and known cost.

^[1] Robert P. Merges & Michael Mattioli, Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Patent Pools, Ohio St. L.J., Vol. 78:2, 281, 284 (2017).

[2] See https://www.justice.gov/atr/page/file/1298626/download.

^[3] See supra note 1, at 312.

[4] Weimin Wu, Patent Pools and Cumulative Innovation, 46 Rutgers L. REC. 40, 57 (2018-2019).

[5] Id. at 58.

Author: Lavinia Meliti, Global Head of Business & Legal Affairs

Lavinia Meliti leads strategy and execution of IPwe’s business and legal initiatives. Passionate about Intellectual Property, she strives to explore its disruption through the escalating integration of Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain technology. She holds two Juris Doctor degrees in Europe and in the United States, and previously worked as an Attorney in Miami, Florida, focusing on IP and Competition Law matters.

About IPwe

IPwe is quickly emerging as creating the industry standard for patent NFTs. IPwe recently announced its partnership with IBM to represent patents as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). IPwe also has a partnership with CasperLabs  to further improve the patent registration process and create a chain of custody (CoC) Solution by using the Casper public blockchain to store, secure, and trace patent data, thereby creating a new approach to patent ownership verification. Patent NFTs are stored and shared on the IPwe Platform, running on the IBM Cloud and Blockchain services such as the Casper Network. IPwe anticipates tokenized IP to become commercially available in Q4 of 2021. IPwe operates in more than 50 countries with offices in Asia, Europe, North and South America. To learn more about how IPwe can provide the answers to your IP-related business decisions, Request a Demo of the IPwe Platform on www.ipwe.com.