Unicorn Patent Portfolio Analysis - Airbnb

Airbnb is a website for people to list, find, and rent temporary housing. It has over 1,500,000 listings in 34,000 cities and 190 countries.

Airbnb is the most notable company of the newly-created “peer-to-peer property rental industry,” which emerged in the beginning of the 21^st century as a part of the sharing economy. With the Internet as a foundation, most industries in the sharing economy have the same core characteristic: a website or online platform that connects two different parties, one that wants to obtain some service for a given period of time, and the other that owns the wanted service or product. In this case, Airbnb serves as the middle point that matches owners of housing space and people who want to obtain temporary housing.

Two of the more notable competitors to Airbnb in the peer-to-peer property rental space are HomeAway and VRBO, owned by Expedia.com, and VacationRentals.com. Before Airbnb, these companies used the same revenue model for 15 years – property owners would buy annual subscriptions to several individual vacation rental websites, while some hosts would pay premium prices for “upgraded” listings to improve their visibility. By contrast, Airbnb charges nothing for property owners to post their spaces and takes fees only when bookings are confirmed. HomeAway responded by offering a pay-per-booking option, but choosing this puts that property at the bottom of search listings. While VRBO and VacationRentals do not have an IP portfolio, HomeAway currently owns five published patents that relate to the presentation and graphing of social data, systems for organizing transaction data, and the correlation of reservations with payment operations. HomeAway seems to own patents that relate very closely to Airbnb’s  core functionalities, so this poses a risk to the company.

From the perspective of Airbnb, it should continue to bolster its IP portfolio by patenting the core components of its business model and some of its novel and non-obvious software innovations that relate to the search, storing, and reservation of vacant housing spaces. Potential intellectual property acquisitions include patents on peer-to-peer algorithms and technologies, including those that do not necessarily relate to housing. Ultimately, Airbnb should move quickly to acquire or publish a high number of patents on each of its novel software functionalities.

Unicorn Patent Portfolio Analysis - Github

Github is a web-based Git repository holding service or “version control system,” which allows software developers to organize their many revisions of software code and store their modifications in a central repository. Github allows developers to easily collaborate, make changes, and upload the newest revision. It offers all of the functionality of the existing open-source platform Git as well as adding its own features, such as a Web-based graphical interface, bug tracking, task management, and wikis for every project.

In spite of their many software innovations, Github has been staunchly opposed to acquiring patents, as they currently have 0 published patents and applications. Github has joined the LOT network, an open patent-licensing program designed to reduce patent litigation. Their belief is that software patents incentivize “patent trolls” to threaten valid software projects to the point that developers either shut their work down or pay the patent troll to move along. According to them, trolls usually target the most successful and innovative projects, which would include many of the projects on Github.

While Github has become an industry standard for software developers and businesses to host their code, there are some competitors. The company Atlassian owns two of Github’s more notable competitors, BitBucket and JIRA. While they are essentially similar systems for most developers, the two services have very different billing structures – Github charges per private repository, while BitBucket charges per private collaborator. Surprisingly, Atlassian only owns one patent, “Efficient hosting of virtualized containers using read-only operating systems,” a patent with regard to virtualized machines that does not relate to this industry. A third competitor is Google’s Cloud Source Repositories, a service in early stages of development that is not on the market yet. As a result, it is not completely clear whether they own intellectual property related to software repositories.

Although creating an intellectual property portfolio would be a highly necessary business decision in almost any other area of business, in an industry where open-source technologies are highly prioritized, it would not be the best decision for Github to create an IP portfolio. Github’s commitment to developing a network of like-minded technology companies who have dedicated themselves to keeping technology open in the hopes of reducing the outsized effects of patent trolls on the litigation system appears to be the best strategic decision for them.

Key Patent in the Case between UltimatePointer and Nintendo

The patent in question is U.S. Patent No. 8,049,729: “Easily deployable interactive direct-pointing system and presentation control system and calibration method therefor”

This patent was at the heart of the Federal Circuit case between UltimatePointer and Nintendo that I discussed last week. In this post, I will examine the claims in greater detail.

The first part of the first claim reads as follows:

1. An apparatus for controlling a feature on a computer generated image, the apparatus comprising:

This first phrase of the first claim specifies that an apparatus directly controls a particular feature on some kind of image. Connecting this to a real-life application, the apparatus is the Wii remote, which directly controls the cursor on a screen within a Wii application.

            a handheld device including:

                        an image sensor, said image sensor generating data related to the distance between a first point and a second point, the first point having a predetermined relation to the computer generated image and the second point having a predetermined relation to a handheld enclosure; and

This part of the claim describes the image sensor that incorporates data regarding the distance between one point on the screen and the other point at the edge of the handheld device.

            a processor coupled to said handheld device to receive said generated data related to the distance between a first point and a second point and programmed to use the distance between the first point and the second point to control the feature on the image.

This final part of the claim shows that the handheld device takes data received by the processor with regards to the distance between the first point and the second point described earlier. As a result of this data available, the handheld device can control the feature on the image.

Claims two through four describe apparatus derived from the original claim 1 that talk in greater detail about the individual components of the direct-pointing system, including the processor, the image sensor, and calibration points.

Claims five through eight describe further descriptions of the handheld device apparatus, specifically regarding the image sensor, processor, and zoom levels. Claims nine through fourteen specify the particular methods that would allow the handheld device apparatus to control the feature on a computer generated image.