Twitter's Odd Patent Portfolio: Where's Its 140-Character Gold?
With Twitter getting ready to go public, intellectual property expert Maulin Shah of EnvisionIP has been prowling through the company’s patent collection, eager to see what special techniques the king of 140-character tweets might be counting as its unique assets. Alas, Shah reports, Twitter holds a shockingly slim portfolio.
随着Twitter准备上市，EnvisionIP公司知识产权专家知识产权专家毛林呼唤绿荫
•沙（Maulin Shah）一直在潜心研究该公司的专利资产组合，渴望发现这家微博之王到底掌握着什么专门技术，能够算作其独一无二的资产。可惜的是，据毛林•沙惊称，Twitter掌握的专利技术少得惊人。 Not every big idea needs to be patented — or deserves to be. But in Silicon Valley, most consumer Internet companies regard patents as a way of shoring up legal protection for their ways of doing things, or perhaps slowing down competitors. According to the U.S. Patent Office’s searchable database, Google is an incessant filer, with 3370 patents to its name, and Yahoo (1449) is nearly as prolific.
并非每一个伟大的创意都需要或者值得申请专利。但在硅谷，大多数消费者互联网公司都认为，专利是加强对公司经营的法律保护或者阻挡对手竞争的一种方式。美国专利商标局的可搜索数据库显示，谷歌（Google）是永无止境的专利申请人，拥有3370项专利，雅虎公司（Yahoo ）也不逞多让，拥有1449项专利。 Moving down the list, Facebook has 143, including several filed by company founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Zynga has 83, Netflix has 21, LinkedIn has five, and Path has at least four. Even MySpace, a fading presence among social media users, has nine.
德国表现画派
顺着专利数量排名往下看，Facebook拥有143项专利，其中包括该公司创始人、首席执行官马克•扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）申请的多个专利。星佳（Zynga）、网飞（Netflix）和LinkedIn分别拥有83、21和5项专利，Path拥有至少4项专利。在社交媒体中地位衰落的MySpace甚至也获得9项专利。
By Shah’s tally, Twitter can boast of just two issued patents.
根据沙的统计， Twitter能拿得出手的只有两项专利。
Half the publicly viewable Twitter patent potfolio consists of US 8448084: “User interface mechanics.” The other half is US 8401009: “Device independent message distribution platform.” Shah observes that Twitter also has a patent application on file for “Prioritizing Messages Within a Message Network.” It’s also possible, he notes, that Twitter may have more patent applications under review that haven’t yet made it into public databases.
在Twitter的专利组合中，一项是US 8448084：“用户界面机制”（User interface mechanics）；另一项是US 8401009：“独立于设备外的讯息分布平台”（Device independent message distribution platform）。沙注意到Twitter还在申请一项名称为“消息网络内的消息择优排序”（Prioritizing Messages Within a Message Network）的专利。他指出，Twitter或许有更多尚未被列入公共数据库中的专利申请在接受审核，这也不是不可能。 It takes time to pull together the full documentation for a patent application — so some small, highly innovative companies may be full of patentable ideas that they just don’t bother turning into official filings. Facebook officials made that argument in the spring of 2
012, when their company’s relatively lean portfolio of a few dozen patents drew attention. But, as Shah notes, Facebook went on to buy sheaves of patents from IBM and Microsoft before completing its initial public offering.
整理一份完整的专利申请文件颇为耗时nc患者——所以一些小规模、极富创新性的公司或许有很多想获得专利的创意，但他们只是无暇对这些创意进行正式专利申请。Facebook的管理人士在2012年的春天也做过类似的表态。当时，该公司公布的专利组合只有相对稀少的几十项，因而引起了外界的注意。但是，正如沙所指，Facebook聚氨酯泡沫在完成它的首次公开募股之前，不停地从IBM和微软公司（Microsoft刘红英处理结果）购买大量专利。
With its skinny patent portfolio, Twitter could be the target of other companies’ patent claims, Shah observed. If so, Shah added, Twitter’s “lack of patent resources will certainly hinder any counter-claim defenses, and Twitter may have to rely on defensive licenses obtained from patent pools that it belongs to, such as the Open Invention Network.”
Twitter的专利资产如此之少，使之可能成为其他公司专利打击的目标。如果是这样，沙补
浙江同志充道，Twitter的“专利资源不足”肯定会限制其实施反制性专利打击的能力，而Twitter将不得不依赖从开源发明网络（Open Invention Network，Twitter 是其成员）获得专利授权来进行防御。
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