Cisco ordered to pay $1.9 billion in U.S. patent infringement damages - could this have been predicted?
Network technology company Cisco has been ordered by a US district judge to pay USD 1.9 billion in patent infringement damages to Centripetal Networks Inc, comprising USD 756 million in actual damages, multiplied by 2.5 to allow for Cisco’s “willful and egregious” conduct, plus prejudgment interest.
The infringement is in relation to four patents, being
All four above are to do with managing data in a network.
Cisco is appealing this judgement.
Ambercite has the ability to predict the potential for licensing of a patent or patent portfolio - so how did it go in this case? Was Ambercite able to predict the Licensing Potential for Centripetal to license to Cisco? And, who else might be in the firing line and make a good candidate for out-licensing?
There are various ways we could approach this question, but in this case, we might start from the full list of patent families owned by Centripetal. We input representative patent numbers for each of these families into Ambercite, and ran a Licensing Search for patents filed after October 2012, the earliest priority date of these patents.
The resulting query looked like this (click on the below to see an interactive version of this query and the results, which you can interrogate one by one)
This query returned 308 patents - in the extract below, which we have sorted, highest to lowest, by the column ‘Licensing Potential’:
Click on the above picture to play with the interactive results set yourself.
The smartest and quickest way to summarise the Licensing Potential across individual patent owners is to export it into Excel, and use a Pivot Table or similar approach to work out the ‘Total Licensing Potential’ for these different applicants. The results are shown below:
So….if I was Centripetal Networks, I might have a fair idea of who to investigate further in regards to licensing. And in this case, to put Cisco on top of my list, I would be right about this assumption.
‘Unknown’ vs ‘Known’ Licensing Potential
In the above graph I have divided the total Licensing Potential into two parts, namely from ‘Known’ forward citations, which are publicly listed forward citations (17 in total) and ‘Unknown’ forward citations (38 in total). Unknown citations are those Ambercite has predicted to be patents of high similarity, yet have not been listed by examiners or applicants as such. The higher the licensing potential per patent-to-patent relationship (known or unknown citation), the more similar Ambercite predicts those patents to be.
From the above graph, we can see that:
The majority of the Licensing Potential value is from unknown citations.
For three out of the next four companies listed, all of their Licensing Potential value comes from ‘Unknown’ citations.
In other words, if you were to rely on conventional citation analysis alone - you might miss potential licensing candidates.
This is why our clients use Ambercite - they fully recognise the value of going beyond conventional citation searching.
Is this is a one-off example?
Not at all - if in doubt, check out our November 2019 blog in relation to another (at one stage) billion dollar judgement for patent infringement, again predicted by Ambercite analysis of the litigated patents, in this case for a university.
Would you like to try Ambercite for yourself?
Ambercite offers a trial license if you sign up yourself - but you will need a full licence to run through a process like it is shown here. To obtain a license, please contact us via the link below - we will only be too happy to set you up, and provide any necessary support.