Who should you sell your patent to?
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Who should you sell your patent to? Video Transcript
If you have an issued patent, not everybody on the street wants to buy patents, so you have to identify the buyer. Who are the potential buyers that might be interested in the patent that you have? So identify the potential buyers by looking at what you are trying to claim. Look at who are the companies in that space, both big and small. You might do a patent search to identify companies that are in that space, who file patents in that space, and probably therefore would value your IP. The other way to look is if you have got a granted patent, you could look at forward references on the granted patent through the USPTO website to see what other applications or patents were stopped because of yours, what are the pending applications that were filed later that were stopped because of yours. The longer that list is potentially the more people that might want to buy your patent. There are some companies that you can sell your patents to. Sometimes, you do not know what they are going to do with it. They might go try sue others with it and the RIM, the Blackberry PDA example is one of those examples where an inventor sold it to a company that primarily goes and sues others and the company made a lot of money. The inventor made some but could have made a lot, lot more. So you want to be careful about that. So figure out who it is that you want to potentially sell your patent to, who are the people and companies in that space. Look at the filed patents in that space which are the assignees of those patents, who owns those patents that are being filed in your space, and to approach them, try to find a trusted party that you know. If you do not know a trusted party, you could perhaps look up on the USPTO website if they are large enough, an attorney that works in that company, a patent attorney that might be able to direct you to the right division. It is often better to talk these things through with an attorney yourself that represents you because there are a lot of pitfalls and there are a lot ways of doing it correctly, to approach licensing negations. Generally, during licensing negotiations, you want to make it a win-win situation for both parties. You want to show the value of not only your patent but your underlying technology, how you have implemented that technology to solve a problem, so to the extent that you are also licensing not just the patent but the technology that goes with it, the thought, the products, the services, the manufacturing that it might go wrong with the product. You will have a higher success rate.