Twenty five businesses fill the space but don t look for employees—many of the offices are empty. “IT LOOKS OVERWHELMINGLY LIKE NPES ARE JUST TARGETING FIRMS THAT ARE MORE LIKELY TO PAY OUT” Known as Non Practicing Entities NPEs the companies in the Baxter Building are located in Marshall for one reason the federal courthouse next door.
There they bring tons of lawsuits accusing other companies of infringing on technology patents—and win many of them In the past few years NPEs have sued Apple Samsung eHarmony Martha Stewart Living and hundreds of other companies sometimes winning judgments for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Proponents say that non practicing entities play a Chinese Overseas America Number Data valuable role by sticking up for small inventors going up against big companies that steal the ideas of entrepreneurs who are unable to fight their own legal battles. NPEs acquire patents either by purchasing them from companies inventors and academic institutions or by being assigned them in the first place for original work. If it weren t for NPEs the argument goes resource rich companies would be free to steal ideas of small inventors without fearing retaliatory lawsuits—and this would poison the business environment. But critics have another name for many NPEs patent trolls.
In this view a significant number of non practicing entities acquire patents for the sole purpose of coercing companies mostly technology firms into paying licensing or settlement fees whether justified or not . Are NPEs friend or foe H. Cohen professor of finance at Harvard Business School Umit G. Gurun of University of Texas at Dallas and Scott Duke Kominers of the Harvard Society of Fellows attempts to answer that question by studying which firms NPEs target in litigation when the litigation occurs and the impact of the legal challenges on the targeted firms abilities to innovate and grow.
發表於 2024-3-12 16:36:04
