June 30, 2008 7:08 AM PDT
Google, Cisco, and others band together against patent trolls
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, Verizon, and others are joining together to buy up patents to prevent the patents being used against them by patent trolls. The group, called the Allied Security Trust, is a bit like the open-source friendly Open Invention Network, but appears to have more cash at its disposal.
The new Allied Security Trust aims to buy patents that others might use to bring infringement claims against its members. Companies will pay roughly $250,000 to join the group and will each put about $5 million into escrow with the organization, to go toward future patent purchases, the people familiar with the initiative said....[C]ompanies in the new group will sell the patents they acquire after they have granted themselves a nonexclusive license to the underlying technology.
Allied Security Trust isn't intended to be a revenue generator for the companies involved, but rather a protective shield against patent trolls big (Intellectual Ventures, which was recently torched in The New Yorker) and small (Acacia).
Will it succeed? Who knows? But any efforts intended to bring some sanity to the patent-litigation racket are very welcome.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
http://blog.openitstrategies.com/2008/06/patent-cartel-formed-to-fight.html