500,000+ Patent Assets and Counting
I hope the summer has been enjoyable for you and your families. There has been little rest here at LOT, as we are proud to announce many new members and the achievement of two major milestones.
Since May, we have had fourteen more companies join LOT, including CBS, CBS Interactive, Yieldify, Cote Capital, Nissan, Honda, Intuit, Garmin, Laminar Research, General Motors, Showtime, The Computer and Communications Industry Association and Zedge.
This quarter we have added three large portfolio owners – Nissan (over 45,000 assets), General Motors (over 44,000 assets), and Honda (over 73,000 assets) – to our existing large portfolio owners such as Canon, Google, Lenovo, Hyundai, Subaru, SAP, Red Hat, Mazda, and Ford (see the full list here). As a result, we are proud to announce that LOT has blown through the 500k/100k asset milestones. LOT Network now has over 573,000 world-wide patent assets including over 120,000 issued US patents in our network. This means LOT can now permanently immunize our members from over half a million assets should they fall into the hands of a Patent Assertion Entity (PAE).
The New Agreement Is Working
All this growth validates that the new LOT Agreement is scaling quickly across industries. I want to thank all of the members for their input on how to improve the original LOT Agreement and for unanimously voting for the new agreement last November. Clearly, we have solved for the PAE problem while preserving the traditional uses of patents. At current rates, we will have over 500 members and two million assets in our network by the end of next year. And all of you, our members, should be proud to take credit for that.
One of the most common questions I’m asked is, “But do LOT members transfer assets?” The answer is YES! Since 2014, the current members of LOT have transferred over 3,500 assets and some have had very vocal and public sales activity. And yes, some of those have fallen into the hands of PAEs. But we are proud to say that no member of LOT has ever been sued by a patent that has left LOT Network. Our solution works.
Simply stated, companies who choose to not join LOT are now at a competitive disadvantage. PAEs can only assert assets that leave the network against those who have chosen not to join.
Optimize Your Risk with LOT
If a company is optimizing its business for success, it must optimize for risk and cost reduction. Given the current value LOT provides, and the growth rate that ensures our value is only going to grow, joining LOT is truly a no-brainer.
I hope you enjoy reading the articles in this newsletter. If you have any questions, suggestions or ideas, please let me know directly. Starting soon, we will begin publishing articles more regularly. If there’s something you or your company would like to share with the LOT Network community, please let me know.