Business
Members each contribute to the operating expense of the trust, and hold funds in escrow for the purchase of patents. Each member's escrow funds are used for the purchase of only those patents that they are interested in. The members involved in the purchase are then licensed to the patents. After a certain period of time, the patents are sold or donated. This is known as a catch and release strategy. AST does not litigate.
Turning to the key function of buy-side decision making – i.e., determining which patents to purchase – AST radiates out such authority to the extremities of the organization, where individual members decide whether to ante up funds on a case-by-case basis. The offices of the AST then serves to aggregate these funds and formulate a bid. RPX is quite different, in that the RPX team, not any one member or collective of members, ultimately controls the power over how best to deploy its multi-million dollar war chest. Given the broad membership base of the organization (many different industries are represented), generally speaking RXP prefers to acquire patents that have an impact across multiple industries.
What is interesting about these fundamentally different processes is that, at least in theory, the AST process potentially taps into an intellectual wherewithal unrivaled in the market (think of the hundreds of senior engineers at each of the 20 or so AST members – that suggests some 2,000 highly skilled engineers in all). Collectively this distributed AST network of technical experts offers a truly awesome knowledge base. However, in practice, it is probable that not all corporate AST members devote the necessary resources needed to establish a robust internal means of consistently evaluating patents in a timely fashion. And if time is of the essence, as it often is, then the centralized RPX decision making process is likely to be better.
Read more about this topic: Allied Security Trust
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