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Microcap & Penny Stocks : PRAV Paradigm Advanced Technologies, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jimpit who wrote (339)	6/28/2001 9:04:57 AM
From: Bill Fortune III	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 466

REWORKING THE PARADIGM Generally, there are two classic I.P. strategies: offensive and defensive. The offensive style is to build a patent portfolio and aggressively pursue any person or company that infringes. Easier to do if you're a huge company with scads of money and a team of lawyers. The defensive approach is to acquire a patent to protect yourself from getting sued. For many smaller companies, I.P. is all that they have. Not long ago, Toronto-based Paradigm Advanced Technologies Inc. was busy developing low-cost, miniature tracking devices for GPSs (global positioning systems) that could transmit their positions over existing national and international cellular wireless networks. During due diligence the company discovered that a broad-based patent already existed, detailing the apparatus and method of transmitting position information from satellite navigational signals, including GPSs, over cellular systems to a base unit. Paradigm didn't panic. Instead, it became the first exclusive worldwide agent to license the patent -- valid until 2011 -- and, last year, purchased all rights to it. It paid in shares and options. Now it's turning the I.P. issue to its own advantage, being in a position to pursue the hundreds of companies that have deliberately or inadvertently trespassed on Paradigm's intellectual property. "Let's put it this way," says Paradigm chairman David Kerzner, "we're a public company, we have thousands and thousands of shareholders and would you believe that our shareholders e-mail us [names of] companies that they know are infringing [our patent], saying, 'Hey, here's another one for ya!' We have hundreds of companies in our database. It's kind of funny." To enforce the patent Paradigm has retained the legal firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, known for such high-profile cases as Napster and the Microsoft anti-trust ruling. Unlike Napster, the GPS patent case is not predicated on defining a new law. Napster "is really about how existing law responds to new technology that doesn't easily fit into pre-existing categories," says Andrew Hayes, general partner at the law firm. "All but the most diehard opponents of Napster will say that it raises new questions about how existing law applies in the Internet world. But there are no disputes about the rights of patent law. This is not even like Amazon's patent on the one-click sale process. No one is saying, 'Is this the kind of thing that could be patented?' [It] is clearly in the mainstream of technological and industrial innovation, that has always been protected by patents." Paradigm has already started to speak to companies in hopes of officially licensing them (à la Intel), and both Kerzner and Hayes reiterate, like Intel, that litigation is a last resort. Kerzner, though hoping he's sitting on a gold mine in this patent, also see its value as an attention-grabber. "It was critical to try to have something unique, something that no one else had, to give us that leverage you need when negotiating with major firms," he says. "When I became aware of this particular patent, I felt it was the key to do that, and I was correct, because we've had many major companies approaching us because of our I.P. We happen to have good product, and happen to have good technology, but we got their attention by having the intellectual property." Full Story can be found at: cbizmag.com Regards, Bill