In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Jay Walker, founder of
Priceline.com, has proposed a kind of neutral private-sector
utility for the licensing of patents.
He argues that "We have spent trillions of dollars
inventing things and 95 to 98 percent of all patents have yet to
make their first dollar of licensing revenue".
Take a small or medium-sized business as an example, let's
call it SME Corp. SME Corp. would use this so-called patent utility
to create a profile of the specifications of its own products
and services. The utility would contain a complete database of the
over 2 million active patents in the USPTO, and would then apply
"Big Data algorithms" to measure the specifications of
SME Corp.'s products and services against the patent database.
This method (which would presumably be patented by Mr.
Walker) would identify "statistical relevance"
between the products and services of SME Corp. and the claims in
the patent database. From Mr. Walker's
