Archive for October, 2006

Anyone interested in the commercialisation of patents and financial aspects of the management of patent portfolios might want to check out the conference “Patents: realising and securing value” which takes place on 21 November in London.

Seekers may act at RPE in total anonymity. Unless a Seeker is successful in a transaction, his identity will not be disclosed to anyone. Only when he changes his role to be the new Holder, the disclosure of his identity to the old Holder is required to complete the transaction.

The Seeker may even control the publication of requests he has made by not giving his consent to a public auction style transaction to the Holder. Accordingly, the Holder will loose the Seeker’s binding bid if a public auction style transaction is started. If the Holder refuses the Request, the public will never be able to know about the Request. Even if the Holder accepts the Request, the public will never know about the transaction at RPE.

Despite the strict protection of the Seeker identity at RPE, a messaging system has been implemented which allows anonymous communication between Seekers and Holders.

RPE’s public auction style transactions are designed to ensure a sale at a price which matches your patent asset’s market value.

An auction-style transaction may be started when a Holder has received a Request with a binding bid from the Seeker, which the Holder then chooses to accept as the reserve price. Since the Holder already has a binding bid serving as the reserve, your listing is guaranteed to end in a successful transaction.

An auction-style transaction may of course be started by a Holder at any time.

Auction style transaction will be featured on RPE’s Marketplace, allowing other Seekers to compete and bid up the final sales price.

When we developed the procedures at RPE, we realized that we needed a novel terminology for simplifying explanations and avoiding confusion. Here are our definitions of some of the terms we use at the site:

Seeker: A member of the RPE community acting in a transaction in the role of an anonymous party trying to acquire patent assets.

Holder: A member of the RPE community acting in a transaction in the role of a party holding patent assets.

Since the terms Seeker and Holder refer to a role, the same member of the RPE community may at the same time act in both roles, although in different transactions. The following definitions are used for the terms relating to transactions:

Request: A Seeker initiated transaction at RPE which is confidential.

Offer: A Holder initiated transaction at RPE which is public.

When you click at the animation at our main page, you can see a typical request procedure. An Offer is an auction-style transaction wherein Seekers can place bids and optionally acquire for a fixed price.