Game Changer: Crowdsourcing Patent Research – An Interview with Cheryl Milone, CEO of Article One Partners
Co-authored by Lillian Pierson
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The World of Ideas and Patents
Let’s say you’re an enterprise start-up bio-tech company with a team over in the left wing that just happened upon an innovative new solution to a problem that plagues your industry. With this solution, years of hard work may potentially pay-off, but only if the solution is, in fact, novel. To determine
your solution’s novelty, you will first need to investigate existing patents for evidence of prior art, or innovations which have previously utilized the solution that your team recently discovered.
Let’s say that you search the USPTO’s (United States Patent Trademark Office) database of existing patents and are reasonably certain that your new solution is novel. Believing this, you secure a patent and begin to market the product. Some three months after marketing begins, to your dismay, you receive a legal complaint citing patent infringement and claiming that your newly patented product is not, in fact, novel. What do you do?
In the past, most companies like yours would have to pay high-priced patent attorneys to represent you and to research the validity of the claim being brought against you. It used to be that a scenario like this would spell bankruptcy for a start-up company like yours, but not so anymore.
Enter Article One P
artners (AOP) - a company that enables its clients to access the world's validity evidence to make better patent-related business decisions. Rather than hire high-cost legal counsel to research the case, you can elicit the help of AOP’s international army of high-tech researchers and turn to them for evidence that negates the validity of the claim brought against you. Through AOP, you have access to researchers in 176 countries and studies translated into nine languages. AOP researchers will scour all publications to which they have access, in search of evidence of prior art that will destroy the validity of the patent infringement claim looming against you. Because of this and thanks to AOP, a patent infringement suit no longer has to be a doomsday scenario for the small tech start-up.
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