"I wanted to find a way to not just pay off patent trolls or buy our way out of the problem," he said. But none of the existing patent-pooling ventures took the approach Jakel had in mind. So last year, he left the Mountain View software company and founded Unified Patents, which is geared toward taking proactive measures designed to ward off NPEs from circling specific sectors.
The first fruits of his labor are ripening now: On Thursday, Unified petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for an inter partes review of a patent held by Clouding IP since 2004, which covers file synchronization techniques employed by most cloud storage solutions. Jakel said the firm will file others, too.
