You may have heard that patent-rich tech companies like Canon, Red Hat and Lenovo are giving away free patents to startups that join a patent protection community. It’s part of a program through the nonprofit of which I’m a part, LOT Network, which is a group of companies ranging from startups to well-known names like Tesla, Facebook Inc., Lyft Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that protect one another from litigation from patent assertion entities (PAE, or “patent trolls”).
Though we live in a world where we’re trained to suspect anything that’s given away for free, there are valid and self-preserving reasons for tech companies to give away patents for free that concurrently benefit startups as well.