Google's New Patents

What if you genuinely innovate, patent your innovation and hope to exploit your IP ? One or more likely, several, pool members will sue you, force you to join the pool and thus destroy your advantage. If they have an established manufacturing division and supply chain, they can churn out your gadget before you even come up with a name. If your innovation is in any way disruptive to their business model, you'll have plenty of legal broadfires thrown your way just to make you go away.

That's kinda-sorta-almost the Open Innovation Network (OIN: as mentioned in the linked article): http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/

Patent pools aren't new - the MPEG LA patent pool (http://www.mpegla.com/main/default.aspx) is one that has gained a lot of attention over the last few years, and they are actively seeking others. MPEG LA is slightly different to OIN because it seeks to raise money for companies in the pool by licencing the patents.

Unfortunately this does not address the issue of patent trolls that produce no product except lawsuits, therefore cannot be sued for violating patents and forced to join the pool.

Could that be the basis for an IP based startup? Seems like a clever hack of the patent & legal system surrounding patents. Of course once there is 1 of these, there will be copycats - which could lead to a race to capture the largest share of patents. Patent wars indeed.

I think very few companies (probably including Google) would be willing to join any sort of pool that requires them to sign over all of their patents to the pool.

from my understanding this is precisely how patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures work