Canon’s latest transfers show it wants more value from its patents — but not at the cost of its anti-NPE ethos
Has Canon finally come to terms with the secondary market in patents?
The Japanese camera-maker has been one of the most vociferous anti-‘troll’ voices out there. While its IP head Kenichi Nagasawa has been outspoken in his criticism of operating companies that sell to non-practising entities (NPEs, or ‘trolls’ to some), it has always been prepared to aggressively defend itself against attacks from them — an, increasingly, to go after infringers of its own IP.
In line with these sentiments, in June 2014 it joined Google, SAP, and Dropbox to co-found the License-On-Transfer (LOT) Network, members of which make a commitment to license any patents they sell to all other LOT members. The idea is that this eliminates any threat those patents may pose to members should they end up in the hands of NPEs (LOT itself prefers the term ‘patent assertion entities’) farther down the line.
Canon also has one of the world’s largest patent portfolios. It holds the third-largest number of active US patent assets after Samsung Electronics and IBM. According to IFI Claims, it received the third highest number of grants (3,056) from the USPTO in 2018, after IBM (9,100) and Samsung (5,850), and owns the second-highest number of…
