Google announces Patent Purchase Promotion, experimental marketplace to sell patents to the company, open from May 8 to 22
Announcing the Patent Purchase Promotion — We invite you to sell us your patents. The Patent Purchase Promotion is an experimental marketplace for patents that's simple, easy to use, and fast.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's Patent Purchase Promotion is an unusual structure: instead of bidding in auctions or buying through brokers, the company opens a two-week window where any patent holder can name a price and sell directly to Google. It sits inside a broader 2015 push on patent quality and access, alongside the simplified prior-art patent search built on Google Scholar.
The related coverage shows this experiment was a first move in a sequence: after the marketplace closed, Google ended up buying 28% of submitted patents at a $150K median price, then began giving patents away to startups as an anti-troll measure, before formalizing portfolio-based defense through PAX and PatentShield with Intertrust in 2017.
First-order effects
- Patent holders — especially individual inventors and small companies — get a direct, fixed-window liquidity path to Google without broker fees or auction uncertainty.
- Google acquires patents straight from small owners, adding to its own portfolio while removing those assets from the open market where assertion businesses source them.
Second-order effects
- With fewer patents reachable on the open market, entities that monetize by asserting patents face thinner sourcing — which is why Google's follow-up was to place acquired patents into startups' hands rather than sit on them.
- Rival platform companies are pressured to build their own defensive-IP programs rather than rely purely on litigation, since one player now both buys and redistributes patents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large platforms evolve from passive litigation targets into de facto clearinghouses that set prices for small-holder IP and control where it lands — the trajectory the later PAX and PatentShield structures confirm.
- A structural split emerges in the market: patents flow either into corporate defensive pools or toward assertion, and whoever operates the pools increasingly shapes licensing norms for entire ecosystems like Android.
The trend: Large technology companies are shifting from defending against patent assertions case-by-case to operating their own acquisition, redistribution, and cross-licensing mechanisms that drain the supply of patents feeding assertion businesses.