Software Engineering Daily

Patents allow individuals and company to lay creative claim for an invention. A patent can provide protection from having its idea being used without giving credit to its creators. Of course, is that patents can be filed and not turned into products, inhibiting innovation. Patents can also be used offensively in a practice known as patent trolling.

Large companies like IBM and Google have so many patents that they have trouble keeping track of them all. And if your company has many different hardware and software products, how can you be sure that your patent collection protects you from a patent troll?

Nicole Shanahan is the CEO of ClearAccessIP, a product that indexes patents, looks for vulnerabilities in a corporation’s patent strategy, and finds opportunities in a patent collection for further value. The large text corpus of a patent collection is the perfect place to apply machine learning.

We discussed the nature of patents, the intersection between law and software, and the product development process of ClearAccessIP.

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