Inwards/outwards Patent Licensing Profiles. Case studies on Canva, Tile and Tinder
Aug 16 2021 Patents are intended to grant a time-limited commercial monopoly for innovative companies, and not surprisingly patents are being filed in greater and greater numbers. This is both good and bad for these companies - on one hand, these companies get to strengthen their intellectual property position - on the other hand, these companies need to consider the patents of companies protecting similar technology.
In practice, many companies deal with this issues by patent licensing. Some patent licensing happens when two companies reach an agreement on a commercial basis - other patent licensing happens as a result of patent litigation, either as a settlement or a court judgment. And there is much patent litigation going on - White and Case reported in March 2021 that US patent litigation cases grew to around to 4,000 cases in 2020, an increase of 13% from 2019.
Clearly, patent litigation is something that users of technology need to worry about, and there is a lot of Freedom-to-Operate searching undertaken by patent owners for this reason. This can be time-consuming and expensive. The opposite case, of looking for other companies that may be infringing your patents, is harder in practice. Yet both analyses can be very helpful in providing an insightful overview of the patent landscape of a company.
One common approach used for understanding Inwards and Outwards Licensing opportunities is to analyse backward and forward citations from your patents. This can efficiently allow you to understand:
The other companies working in this space, and what patents they filed.
How busy an area of technology is. The most forward and backward citations your patent(s) have, the most commercially important they may be. Patents cost money to file and prosecute - so each patent in an area of technology is a commercial ‘vote’ for the value of the technology, and an expensive vote at that.
Ambercite citation data can be leveraged to provide provide a snapshot of these risks and opportunities in the form of Inwards and Outwards Licensing Profiles.
In this blog, we will use data from Ambercite to create sample Inward and Outward Licensing Profiles for the graphic design company Canva, the object tracking data Tile, and the dating company Tinder. But firstly, we will briefly consider why we are using Ambercite to run this analysis.
Why Ambercite provides a unique perspective
Ambercite are the patent citation specialists - while other databases can list citations, Ambercite goes a lot further:
Ambercites ranks these citations by its metric “Similarity Score”.
Ambercite can find ‘unknown’ citations, which similar patents missed by the existing list of citations.
Ambercite also calculates a metric “Licensing Potential”, which considers both the similarity of similar patents, and also the citation popularity of these similar patents. Licensing Potential has been shown in these blogs here and here to correlate to patent litigation, but in this blog we will focus on what Inward and Outward licensing Analysis can tell us about patents in general.
Analysing individual patents - or groups of patents?
Ambercite can analyse individual patents, groups of related patents, or entire patent portfolios. All options are useful at times, and the best approach depends on your specific objectives:
If you are looking at ranking the patents within your portfolio, it makes sense to review the patents individually, or perhaps small groups of closely related patents
If you want to consider your entire portfolio, you can input up to 200 patents (in fact patent families) into Ambercite, and there is also an API option if you want to review more than that. If you have more than 200 patents and don’t wish to engage with an API, you can identify the most likely to be more important patents, or break your portfolio down into groupings of technology.
In this case study, we will analyse the entire portfolio of the three companies, but in an upcoming blog we will look at reviewing individual patents within a patent portfolio.
Case study 1 of Inward and Outward Licensing - Canva
Canva is an Australian start-up that has become a ‘unicorn’ valued at USD15 billion a few short years after it was formed. The key product of Canva is an online design platform that is easy to use, accessed via a Freemium business model.
We searched for patents filed by Canva, and found 8 granted standard patent families. So what can Inward/Outward Licensing Analysis tell us about these families?
We might start with Inward Licensing.
Inward Licensing Profile - Canva
Using the process described at the end of the blog, we produced the following Inward Licensing Profile for Canva, which is shown below:
But how similar are the patents filed in this area? To understand this, we have listed the most similar patents (to the Canva patent portfolio, as identified by Ambercite) filed by each of these companies:
Judging from these titles, these patents appear to be relevant to the operation of Canva. Corbis was a photo-library company owned by Bill Gates, until it was sold to Chinese interests in 2016. Its patents have been assigned to Branded Entertainment Network, which apparently is still owned by Bill Gates, while Zazzle is a company that allows consumers to make their own customized products:
We should note that besides the top listed patents in the table above, this process can provide a full list of the similar patents filed by each of the listed companies, and even the companies further down the list.
Outward Licensing Analysis for Canva
A similar process led to the resulting Outward Licensing Profile for Canva:
This suggests Adobe is the company filing the most similar patients since 2013. The second-ranked company, Box, describes itself as providing ‘secure content collaboration’.
Again, this suggests licensing or collaboration opportunities with these companies for Canva. Best Apps does not appear to have any commercial products - maybe Canva could look at these patents to strengthen its IP position?
Comparing Inwards and Outwards Licensing Analysing
If we compare the Inwards and Outwards profiles, we can see that that the Outwards Licensing Profile seems to be stronger, suggesting that Canva has a reasonable IP position in its technology area., particularly in relation to Adobe*. However, it would also need to consider the patents filed by the likes of Corbis, Zazzle and Microsoft to confirm that it no Freedom-to-Operate risks.
*Note - this is a preliminary analysis only that aims to find obvious risks and opportunities. A more detailed analysis would be the next step - but this preliminary analysis does suggest where we should start.
Case Study 2 - Tile
Tile is an American consumer electronics company that produces tracking devices that users attach to their belongings such as keys and backpacks By using a similar process to what we did with Canva, we have determined an Inward Licensing Profile based on their 46 patent families:
As well as their Inward Licensing Profile:
The top company on the Inward Profile was Qualcomm (developer of wireless technology), with the top listed patent with clear relevance to a tracker. The second patent in the list of Inwards Patents is for a telemetry system for implanted medical device - which does overlap in some ways with the Tile technology. This is a great example of how sometimes this process can throw unexpected yet relevant companies.
The leading company on the Outward Profile is Pebblebee (PB Inc), which appears to provide a competing product to Tile. Note that this analysis is not proof that Pebblebee is infringing any patents owned by Tile, but I would suggest that the attorneys from Tile would be considering this carefully.
Case Study 3 - Tinder
Tinder is a leading online dating company. We found 38 active patent families filed or acquired by online dating company Tinder (or its parent company Match), with the earliest priority date of January 2003. Using these patents, we have prepared the following Inwards Licensing Profile:
And Outwards Licensing Profile:
Note the very different profiles for Inward and Outward Licensing, with the Inward Licensing Profile Outward Licensing profile dominated by America Online (AOL), while the Outward Licensing Profile is led by Twilio, Experian and Facebook. Twilio is a ‘cloud communications platform’, while the leading Experien (credit scoring company) patent relates to a method for identifying users, which is probably important in online dating. The leading Facebook patent also appears to be relevant.
However, there are relatively few direct online dating patents in this list - suggesting that Tinder (and its parent company Match Group) may have a unique position in this market.
Process used for producing Inward/Outward Licensing Profiles
We will discuss how we did for the Inward Licensing Profile for Canva - a similar process was used for the other results.
To run this analysis, we copied these patent numbers into Ambercite, with the resulting query looking like shown below. Note that we have applied a ‘Before date filter’ of April 2013, which is the priority date of the earliest of the Canva patents. We have also set the Search Type to be “Licensing’.
This returned 250 patents as requested. These patents had a series of Similarity Scores, where a greater Similarity Score suggests more similar patents :
From experience in analysing portfolios, it can be helpful to have a minimum similarity score of 0.5 for each of the eight granted Canva patent families searched , i.e. a total of 4. We have set up a filter for this.
Patents have a limited lifetime, so to we might put a date limitation of a priority date in the last 20 years:
After these two filters, we ended up with 126 patents to analyse.
Running the Licensing analysis
The next step is to export these results into a spreadsheet, and run a pivot table to add the ‘Licensing Potential’ (a metric calculated by Ambercite based on the similarity and connectedness of the patents found) values together for each applicant. While most readers of this blog should be capable of doing this themselves, this process can be sped up significantly if you use an Excel macro to prepare the pivot tables and prepare the graphs and tables. This is what we have done in this blog- by using these macros, it can take just a few simple clicks to produce outputs similar to what is shown above. Ambercite would be happy to share these macros with its clients via an Excel add-in - please contact the author if you would like a demonstration of, or access to, these macros.
Outward Licensing Analysis
This involves a similar process, with the exception that we use an After date filter setting, as shown below
Want to try Ambercite for yourself?
Ambercite offers free trials, but to get the most of this, please contact us for a demonstration. You can try either option via the links below: