Who's Buying? Quarterly Report (2014 Q4)
At the ROL Group we carefully track the packages for sale on the brokered patent market in our proprietary database. This quarter we analyzed the USPTO assignment database to identify sales from unsold packages from the past few years. We identified 37 sales and in this post we will share the top buyers from the quarter.
Buyers identified as purchasing multiple packages in the ROL Group 2014 Q4 sales review
III Holdings is a comprised of the packages purchased by III Holdings 1, LLC. and III Holdings 2, LLC.. As identified our previous blog post, Intellectual Ventures is Buying Again, III Holdings 1, LLC is the name of the of Intellectual Ventures Invention Investment Fund 3 (IIF3). We are assuming that III Holdings 2, LLC. is also a part of IIF3. So, Intellectual Ventures is again the most dominant buyer in the market.
Process
It is important to note that these are exclusively purchase from the brokered market and do not include private purchases.
In order to identify a package as sold, the assignment data for each of the US issued patents in a package is compared to the deal intake date in our database. If the recorded date of an assignment of any asset is found to be after the deal intake and the assignment if from the entity listing the package to a different entity then the entire package is marked as sold. These records are human reviewed to account for internal and historical assignment cleanups. Additionally, the recorded date is used rather than the executed date because there can be multiple executed dates within one Reel/Frame.
However, because sales are based on the date on which the sale is recorded at the USPTO, both the identification of the sale and the date of sale may be delayed. Many buyers do not immediately record their sales with the USPTO after the deal closes – the average delay is three months, based on spot-checks of a random sub-sample of the sold packages. For this reason, some of the sales listed above may have actually occurred prior to 2014 Q4