IP Australia – the government agency responsible for administration of Australia’s patent, trade mark and design registration systems – has an important role to play in educating the public about the value of intellectual property and the requirements and processes for securing IP rights. Generally speaking, I think it does a good job of this. In particular, the News and Community section of IP Australia’s website includes links to many useful webinars and case studies that explain how the various types of IP rights work, and how they may be used to add resilience and value to a business. This is (presumably) the work of the Communications, Public Awareness & Education team within the Customer Experience Group at IP Australia (see here for information on the organisational structure). However, a recently-added case study suggests that this team may not be as familiar as it could be with the work of the Policy & Stakeholders Group or the Patents Examination Group.
I am referring to the case study Longtail UX: Patented Digital Products, which was published on 29 September 2022. The case study discusses the experience of the Australian company Longtail UX (LUX), which describes itself as ‘the world’s first Customer Acquisition Platform’, in deciding to pursue patent protection for its technology. Put very simply, LUX has developed a software platform that automatically generates additional pages – particularly for e-commerce sites – that are highly relevant to specific search terms by aggregating information (e.g. product descriptions) extracted from existing pages. The advantage of this is that when someone searches for the specific term, e.g. using Google, the corresponding automatically-generated page will appear far higher in the search results than any of the original pages which were only partly relevant to the search. Personally, I think that is a pretty clever idea. And it must work fairly well, because LUX has been around since 2013 and counts many well-known online businesses (both in Australia and overseas) among its clients.
The case study tells the story of a business that started out with no IP protection strategy, and which first considered patents primarily as a marketing tool. Later on, however, LUX came to realise that patents could add real value that could be important when raising capital or looking at a potential sale of the business. Now – a number of years and two families of patent applications further down the road – LUX is on the verge of expanding into Europe, and extolling the virtues of engaging patent professionals to guide the company through the complicated process of obtaining patents in Australia and overseas.
Regular readers of this blog will already know what is missing from this encouraging story about patents adding value to an innovative business. LUX’s inventions are computer-implemented. And they are applied to the field of search engine marketing. This does not necessarily mean that they cannot be patented, in Australia or elsewhere. But it does mean that even if they can be patented, the process these days is very likely to be more complex, drawn out and expensive than would be expected in less contentious fields of technology. Yet there is no mention of this in the case study, despite the fact that IP Australia has become a world-leader in pushing the limits of patent-(in)eligibility of computer implemented inventions through the courts, and is now one of the more challenging IP offices around the world for obtaining patents on such inventions.
So how is LUX actually faring with its patent acquisition strategy? I have taken a look at the progress of its applications in Australia, the United States and Europe, and found that its fortunes have been more mixed than the case study reveals.
