Not a lot has gone right for Yahoo recently. In a July 6th article, we discussed how Yahoo was touting nearly 3,000 patents in an auction estimated to bring in over $1 billion to the company that has yet to turn itself around in this competitive market. It appears, after a report from TurboPatent, more bad news is on the horizon for Yahoo.
Monday July 11, 2016, TurboPatent published a report that claimed 44% of the thousand plus patents Yahoo sold have “high severity” issues and nearly all of them, including pending patents, have issues that could lead them to be invalidated. This, unfortunately, could make it very difficult for Yahoo to bring in the $1 billion they were estimating.
James Billmaier, CEO of TurboPatent, explained over the course of several days, TurboPatent deployed its machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to assess similarities between Yahoo’s portfolio and other patents to determine how vulnerable the Yahoo patents would be to invalidity challenges. Yahoo’s portfolio consists of 1,757 patents and 896 patent applications.
“[Our] analysis found Yahoo!’s Excalibur patent portfolio contains a much higher percentage of potentially worthless patents than the average patent portfolio,” TurboPatent said in a statement.
Besides the 44% of patents thought to have “high severity” vulnerabilities meaning a 90% chance a patent would not survive a challenge, the report also found another 53% had “low” or “moderate” vulnerabilities. Low meaning, 10-20% likelihood the patent would not survive a challenge and moderate meaning a 50% chance of not surviving.
The report also mentions the names of companies that have frequently cited Yahoo’s patents, Google and Microsoft being two of them.
However things turn out for Yahoo, it would be best, if buying any of these patents, to go in with a buyer beware mentality given the above information.