Patent Law

The following is excerpted from an article by Richard Acello from the March 2009 print issue of the ABA Journal: 

Bothered by ?patent trolls,? those pesky creatures who wait for inventions to hit the market and then cry, ?I?ve got your patent; now pay me?? John Amster says he has a solution.

Amster, an intellectual property lawyer, is a co-founder of RPX Corp. in San Fran­cisco, which buys up patents. For a fee, subscribers get access to all the patents in its portfolio.

?We provide a patent-defense aggregation service,? he says. ?We buy a significant volume of patent rights, either actual or potential threats to companies that will be our members. ... [Members] get a license to everything in our aggregation.?

RPX, open for business since September, boasts IBM, Cisco Systems and Epson as clients.

Read the full article here.