Google Public Policy Blog: Patents

Improving patent quality one search at a time

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Good patents support innovation while bad patents hinder it. Bad patents drive up costs for innovative companies that must choose between paying undeserved license fees or staggering litigation costs. That’s why today we are excited to launch a new version of Google Patents, which has the power to improve patent quality by helping experts and the public find the most relevant references for judging whether a patent is valid.

The ability to search for the most relevant references--the best prior art--is more important today than ever. Patent filings have steadily increased with 600,000 applications filed and 300,000 patents issued in 2014 alone. At the same time, litigation rates are continuing their dramatic climb, with patent trolls bringing the majority of cases, hitting companies of every size in industries from high-tech to main street.

Traditional searches often focus on other patents. But the best prior art might be a harder-to-find book, article, or manual. That was true in the “shopping cart” patent case. After many companies paid out millions in settlements, a court finally struck down the patent in light of two books that were not found by the examiner who issued the patent.

The new Google Patents helps users find non-patent prior art by cataloguing it, using the same scheme that applies to patents. We’ve trained a machine classification model to classify everything found in Google Scholar using Cooperative Patent Classification codes. Now users can search for “autonomous vehicles” or “email encryption” and find prior art across patents, technical journals, scientific books, and more.

We’ve also simplified the interface, giving users one location for all patent-related searching and intuitive search fields. And thanks to Google Translate, users can search for foreign patent documents using English keywords. As we said in our May 2015 comments on the PTO’s Patent Quality Initiative, we hope this tool will make patent examination more efficient and help stop bad patents from issuing which would be good for innovation and benefit the public.

Posted by Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents and Ian Wetherbee, Software Engineer for Google Patents

Announcing the Patent Purchase Promotion

Monday, April 27, 2015

We invite you to sell us your patents. The Patent Purchase Promotion is an experimental marketplace for patents that’s simple, easy to use, and fast.

Patent owners sell patents for numerous reasons (such as the need to raise money or changes in a company’s business direction). Unfortunately, the usual patent marketplace can sometimes be challenging, especially for smaller participants who sometimes end up working with patent trolls. Then bad things happen, like lawsuits, lots of wasted effort, and generally bad karma. Rarely does this provide any meaningful benefit to the original patent owner.

So today we’re announcing the Patent Purchase Promotion as an experiment to remove friction from the patent market. From May 8, 2015 through May 22, 2015, we’ll open a streamlined portal for patent holders to tell Google about patents they’re willing to sell at a price they set. As soon as the portal closes, we’ll review all the submissions, and let the submitters know whether we’re interested in buying their patents by June 26, 2015. If we contact you about purchasing your patent, we’ll work through some additional diligence with you and look to close a transaction in short order. We anticipate everyone we transact with getting paid by late August.

By simplifying the process and having a concentrated submission window, we can focus our efforts into quickly evaluating patent assets and getting responses back to potential sellers quickly. Hopefully this will translate into better experiences for sellers, and remove the complications of working with entities such as patent trolls.

There’s some fine print that you absolutely want to make sure you fully understand before participating, and we encourage participants to speak with an attorney. More detailed information about the Patent Purchase Promotion is available on our Patent Website, including all the fine print, the form to make a submission (which won’t go live until May 8), and details about what happens if Google agrees to buy your patent. Throughout this process, Google reserves the right to not transact for any reason.

We’re always looking at ways that can help improve the patent landscape and make the patent system work better for everyone. We ask everyone to remember that this program is an experiment (think of it like a 20 percent project for Google’s patent lawyers), but we hope that it proves useful and delivers great results to participants.

Posted by Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents

Broadening Google Patents

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Cross-posted with the European Public Policy Blog and Inside Search Blog.Google PatentsPrior Art FinderChinese dual-drive bicycleGerman valve for inflating bicycle tiresCanadian trailer to your bikeWIPO application for pedalling with one legGoogle Translate

Happy patent searching!

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

More patents in the service of open source

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Posted by Duane Valz, Senior Patent Counsel

Open-source software has accelerated the pace of innovation in computing, leading to better products and services at lower cost. But as the impact of open-source software has grown, so too has the number of patent attacks against it.

In March, we announced an Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge—committing not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Our goal was to encourage pro-competitive, defensive uses of patents to support open-source innovation.

Today we are pleased to expand the OPN Pledge to include an additional 79 patents. These patents cover software used to efficiently operate data centers, including middleware, distributed storage management, distributed database management, and alarm monitoring.

We acquired these patents from IBM and CA Technologies, companies that in 2005 were among the first to make open-source patent pledges. The goal of the patent system is to foster innovation, and we aim to use patents, whether acquired or developed internally, in support of that goal.

You can learn more about this second group of patents and the Pledge itself on our site, which we’ve also updated to make it easier to browse and download data on pledged patents.

To date, the patents we’ve included in the Pledge have generally related to “back-end” technologies: servers, data centers, and the like. But open-source software is also transforming the development of consumer products that people use every day—so stay tuned for additional extensions to patents covering those sorts of technologies.

It’s time to take action against patent trolls and patent privateering

Friday, April 5, 2013

Posted by Matthew Bye, Senior Competition Counsel

Today, we submitted comments together with BlackBerry, EarthLink and Red Hat to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice on the growing harm caused by patent assertion entities (more widely known as patent trolls).

We’ve been encouraged by recent attention on the problem of trolls, which cost the U.S. economy nearly $30 billion a year. Trolls are hurting consumers and are increasingly going after small businesses, hampering innovation and reducing competition.

Our comments today also focus on a worrisome trend: some companies are increasingly transferring patents to trolls—and providing incentives to assert those patents against their competitors. These transfers can raise rivals’ costs and undermine patent peace.

This trend has been referred to as “patent privateering”: a company sells patents to trolls with the goal of waging asymmetric warfare against its competitors.

Trolls use the patents they receive to sue with impunity—since they don’t make anything, they can’t be countersued. The transferring company hides behind the troll to shield itself from litigation, and sometimes even arranges to get a cut of the money extracted by troll lawsuits and licenses.

Privateering lets a company split its patent portfolio into smaller sub-portfolios “stacked” on each other, increasing the number of entities a firm must negotiate with and multiplying licensing costs. This behavior unfairly raises competitors’ costs, ultimately driving up prices for consumers.

It also undermines incentives for companies to work together towards “patent peace” through good-faith negotiation and cross-licensing. If cross-licensing is nuclear deterrence for patents, then privateering has the opposite effect, facilitating patent proliferation and aggression.

We’re asking other companies to work with us to develop cooperative licensing agreements that can help curb privateering. We’re also encouraged that the FTC and DOJ are paying attention to this critical issue, and we hope they will continue to study how abusive troll litigation and patent privateering are harming innovative industries.

Public Policy Blog

Improving patent quality one search at a time

Announcing the Patent Purchase Promotion

Broadening Google Patents

More patents in the service of open source

It’s time to take action against patent trolls and patent privateering

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