Google takes patent troll issues into its own hands and opens up a patent market that will cater to all interested patent sellers in the U.S.
As it announced Monday morning, it is launching a Patent Purchase Promotion, an experiment project that targets to improve the current patent buying and selling scheme.
The market will accept patent offers on May 8 through May 22 only, via the online portal that Google has set up. During this period, interested patent sellers can submit their work and set their price. After the portal closes, Google will review all the submissions and select the patents it wants to purchase.
The portal does not have an indefinite timeline because Google wants to make sure that it can work quickly on the submitted patents and immediately provide responses to its sellers. The company wants to provide answers as early as June 26 to then be able to pay sellers by late August.
The patents Google chooses to buy will undergo due diligence, and transactions will be made in short order. The WEB giant encourages those who wish to participate to make sure they understood the fine print of the program and even recommended that they hire lawyers to help them with the process.
This idea was a product of Google's program that allows employees to devote 20 percent of their time to unofficial projects in hopes to come up with innovations such as this. Though this project is currently experimental, the results of the first batch of patent submissions can greatly determine if this market would re-open in the future. After all, it not only allows Google to help patent sellers against patent trolls, but it also gives Google the chance to be the first to get hold of more ideas that could result to greater profit in the long run.
