As I complete my first year at the helm of LOT Network, I want to thank all of you for your support and commitment. As a community, we have exceeded every one of the first year goals set by our Board of Directors. In particular, we have grown from fifteen members to more than sixty, and we are proud to have Hyundai, Kia, PCS, PegaSystems, Logitech, Subaru, and Lenovo, as well as ten start-ups, join our community within the past few months.
This new activity has nearly tripled the number of assets in our network. We currently immunize our members should any of over 404,000 patent assets fall into the hands of a patent troll. With the new LOT Agreement, LOT Network has moved from a conceptual idea to a validated solution for the patent troll problem. I thank you for the feedback and support that led us to unanimously approve the new agreement, which is now rapidly scaling across a wide variety of industries.
Let’s keep growing
As always, we continue to look for ways to grow the network as quickly as possible. It should be no surprise that you — our members — are the best references and sources of leads. The value of your membership in LOT and the breadth of your “troll immunization” goes up with each company and patent asset we add to the network. We welcome any suggestions of opportunities to educate other companies of the value of LOT (e.g. internal supplier meetings, industry conferences, blogs, etc.), and have even included a quick email link in this newsletter to help you efficiently reach out to friends or colleagues you feel may benefit from joining.
We are also receiving many requests from journalists and conference organizers to put forward corporate executives to discuss LOT Network. If you are interested, please let me know.
At the very least, I would hope you would share this newsletter with anyone interested in LOT.
Help make our community even stronger by telling your friends and colleagues about LOT Network. Refer a friend…
Additional membership benefits are on the way
My priority is adding value for you, the LOT Network members. At the top of the list, of course, is continuing our strong growth.
But we are also exploring a range of additional services and features that LOT Members can take advantage of, as a further benefit of membership. One tool that we are currently developing, for example, is a members-only database to help determine if a patent asset that a troll is asserting against you might have been part of LOT Network at one time.
This new quarterly newsletter is also designed to be helpful – featuring “news you can use” in your professional life. For example, our friends at SAS share some advice on how to reduce risk within your supply chain. The newsletter also features an exclusive offer from the Toler Law Group, a profile of Mark Sole, the CEO of Sipree, plus upcoming events, some good press we’ve received over the past few months, and so on.
If you haven’t already done so, please feel free to identify someone from your organization who is interested in being directly involved with the growth of LOT, and who can provide strategic input from your company and industry on how we may be able to grow and best service our members.
We’re all doing the right thing
At the SAS anti-NPE conference, RPX reported that there were over 4,100 new defendants of patent troll litigations in 2015: a 28% increase from 2014. I’m sorry if you were one of them.
Eighty percent of the patents used by trolls against high-tech companies were originally created by operating companies. By joining LOT, all of you have effectively pledged to be part of the solution. LOT Network is a community of good corporate citizens that have decided to work together to develop the cure for the patent troll problem. I’m proud to be working with all of you and look forward to what we accomplish in year two.