IP Street Blog

Pokémon Go has basically taken over the universe.

We’ve heard almost nothing else about gaming and technology since its release in July. So many people have downloaded the game that it's redefined what success means for a mobile game launch.

And it’s also been a smash financial success. By all accounts, it’son track to turn out $1 billion per year in revenue. Not bad for a game that’s only been out for a month.

But who’s making all that money?

Nintendo’s now-notorious stock jump was attributed to some botched market analysis that assumed they were raking in the dough from its overnight success. (Hint: They have a small stake, but it’s not really their thing).

There are a lot of IP analysis and monitoring tools out there.

Too often, firms are are caught off guard when an existing company or a new one enters their market. In the era of social media and billion-dollar deals, being reactionary to new competition can be devastating to even giant firms. Many markets are ripe for external disruption.

In early 2015, an anonymous source leaked 11.5 million confidential documents relating to offshore entities represented by Panamanian corporate services firm, Mossack Fonseca. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has been diligently working their way through this glut of documents for the last year and published their first findings on April 3rd, 2016.

While journalists and law enforcement comb the documents for hints of financial irregularities, we at IP Street can't help be realized that there is an intellectual property angle to this story as well. Assigning patent assets to offshore companies has long been used as an effective tax mitigation strategy and privacy laws in many of the tax haven countries makes it nearly impossible to identify who owns what patents. Patent privateering is a very real thing but analyzing the scope of its use is exceeding difficult.  The Panama Papers offer us a unique opportunity to look behind the curtain  and see how these shell games really work and who's playing them.  

IP Street was founded nearly 6 years ago by some of the most progressive thinkers in the intellectual property world with the goal of enabling our users to rapidly understand patents as an asset class and their role in the greater economy.  Our goal is the same today but advancements in modern software architecture have caused the diversity of use-cases for our advanced patent analytics algorithms to expand beyond anything we could have hoped for.