Companies have traditionally obtained patents for purposes of protecting specific products against market competition from interlopers. Without a patent, after all, the inventor can operate as a free testing facility for others – if the product fails, the cost is the inventor’s, but if the product succeeds, the competition can copy the idea and compete.

Increasingly, however, companies and individual inventors are finding themselves with patents that are not needed to protect specific products against competition. For example:

• A product, product line, or whole business may have failed, leaving behind valuable patents
• A company may have shifted strategy, selling or cutting a business, leaving behind valuable patents
• A company may have acquired a smaller business, finding itself in possession of valuable patents unrelated to previous products
• Research direction may have changed, leaving valuable patents in a field no longer of use internally
• Product development may not match the time period of maximum patent protection, such as when competitors practice an invention before the company’s products are released

For any of those reasons, the patents may be valuable but not to the patent holder.