Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

TAEUS Corporation is the world’s first engineering company dedicated to patent licensing, formed originally in July 1992. TAEUS grew organically, helping AT&T identify the best patents obtained in its 1992 NCR purchase. TAEUS served not only AT&T, but all its daughter companies, including Lucent, Avaya, and LSI, for the next two decades.

In 1994, TAEUS began helping IBM identify its best patents. We documented specifically how competitive products and services used IBM patents. Our claim charts enabled IBM to earn more than $2B/yr in licensing income by 2000, becoming one of the world’s most revered patent licensing companies.

InterDigital employed TAEUS in 1993 to prove how GE/Ericsson and Motorola were using their patents. After investigating Motorola, we helped put InterDigital on the global patent licensing map.

Motorola next asked us to investigate Qualcomm for using their patents, back when Qualcomm was still a startup. Our investigation illustrated clearly how Qualcomm used Motorola’s patents.

A few years later, Qualcomm retained TAEUS to illustrate how both Broadcom and Nokia were using their patents in their semiconductor and cellular telephone networks, respectively.

In 2011, Intel challenged TAEUS to provide 30 claim charts in 30 days illustrating how a major software company used its patents. We delivered 31 claim charts in less than 30 days, for a very competitive fixed price.

Pivot time: Investigating commercially significant products and services for one customer would often yield evidence of how other companies’ patents were being used by the product we were investigating. We would let the patent owners know that we had discovered evidence of their patents being used by the other product. Our news was often received with chagrin because the owner of the patent might then have to contemplate litigation or licensing negotiations with an extremely large defendant. We knew there must be a better way.

What if… a company could pay a single price and license ALL the patents they might be using? What if we distributed that money to the patent owners according to the quality of their patents?

We began to socialize this idea with our clients around the world. Everyone loved it! We had to work out many, many details, but PatentBooks was ready to launch back in 2015! 

Meanwhile, the management team in place at TAEUS became both greedy and dishonest. Perhaps we did not sell PatentBooks well enough internally. Certain former TAEUS employees just thought they could leave the company and begin their own businesses, duplicating the TAEUS business by taking TAEUS customers.

Without going into the gory details, TAEUS had to secure its business and intellectual property by not allowing former employees who stole information to compete with TAEUS.  Meanwhile, TAEUS was not paying its bills. TAEUS entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy from December 2015 to February 2020. During this bankruptcy period, TAEUS was able to not only stabilize its finances but to continue to advance PatentBooks as the world’s most efficient patent licensing platform.

Today, 93 of the top 100 US patent owners have employed TAEUS to help them maximize the value and use of their patents, trade secrets, know-how, brands, and copyrights.