Cross Licensing & the N/D taxonomy of Classifiers

The n/d classifiers help with the problem of patent licensing involving companies with large global portfolios in the following scenarios:

• Cross-licensing, to help calculate an estimate of a cross-license with another company

• Royalty payments attributable to multiple organisations

• Monetisation, to compare outcomes of patent sale versus licensing

• Acquisitions, to provide objective evidence of potential value when purchasing patent portfolios

• Patenting, to correlate portfolios to revenue and market share data

The challenge

The n/d taxonomy was inspired by the trend in litigation and arbitration to focus on global portfolio deals coupled with the inconsistency and bias involved in manual reading and sampling of large cohorts of patents.

While not all patents have equal value there is typically only a small number of high-valued patents, so it is unlikely that all of these will be included in one single portfolio, and when looking at large enough portfolios we can make useful estimates as the the relative strength of portfolios.

The solution

The n/d taxonomy helps calculate the number of patents in any technology that are owned by one company (the numerator, n), and the total population of families with a US grant (the denominator, d). This can be used to compare two companies portfolios, not just against each other, but against all patents covering the technology.

How was the n /d taxonomy developed?

The n/d taxonomy of classifiers was created in collaboration with AST, the leading provider of patent defence solutions. AST has developed a list of technology classifiers based on market research conducted over the past 10 years and has analysed more than 100,000 patents.

The n/d taxonomy helps with the problem of patent licensing involving companies with large global portfolios in the following scenarios:

• Cross-licensing, to help calculate an estimate of a cross-license with another company

• Royalty payments attributable to multiple organisations

• Monetisation, to compare outcomes of patent sale versus licensing

• Acquisitions, to provide objective evidence of potential value when purchasing patent portfolios

• Patenting, to correlate portfolios to revenue and market share data

1. Click 'start' in the 'New n/d report' tile of the home page (if you do not see this tile, please speak with a member of the team as it may not be a part of your current subscription)

2. Select the organisations of interest, or upload a list of patents to simulate a custom portfolio

3. Click 'next' to name and run the report

4. Select whether to 'allow overlapping technologies' (default), or 'group in mutually exclusive technologies. (more information on these options can be found here).

5. Once the report has loaded, click the export report options icon in the top left of the report screen (red square with the arrow and box in it).

6. From here, select 'n/d report' on the bottom left:

7. You then have the option to 'start' running your report (see image below). This will be generated as an excel file, downloaded directly from the browser to your downloads.