The LOT Network (License on Transfer) is a non-profit community of companies that have agreed to grant their fellow members a free license to any of their patents, should those patents fall into the hands of an NPE. This immunizes the community against patent infringement lawsuits brought by NPEs for the patents held in the LOT Network. According to the LOT Network, in 2015, 3,608 NPE lawsuits were led in the US, and operating companies, before NPEs acquired them, originally held 80% of the patents asserted. Google, Canon, and the multinational software companies Red Hat and SAP founded the consortium in 2014, and it now has around a hundred members, including global brands such as Amazon, Netfix, Fidelity, JCPenney, and smaller start-ups that could be put out of business by a single patent lawsuit. Collectively the group holds around 588,000 patents.