• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 12, 2016

Yahoo's patents and applications portfolio, Excalibur IP—mostly search and advertising related—went up for sale, but a report released Tuesday suggests 44% have one or more "high severity issues." This means those patents and applications are potentially worthless because the issues could prevent the patents from being enforced or defended in the future.

The report by Seattle-based TurboPatent, which developed machine learning algorithms to analyze the content of patents and applications, breaks down the "issues" by category like miswriting, not associating claims with other supported materials, or being too abstract when describing the business process within the claims

Approximately 30% of the average patent portfolio of large corporations is worthless because the patents are either invalid, outdated, severely flawed or unrelated to the corporation's business, or they add nothing to the market value of either the portfolio or the corporation, according to Jim Billmaier, TurboPatent co-founder and CEO.

The report also identifies the companies that have cited Yahoo's patents most frequently. Google has cited Yahoo patents or applications 2,915 times, according to the report. Microsoft follows with 1,741; and IBM with 1,576. Jumptap, Yahoo, Salesforce, Millennial Media, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Seven Networks, Veveo, eBay, Oracle, and Citrix have also cited Yahoo patents or applications.

Executives at four of the 15 companies named on the Yahoo's patent and application citation list had spoke with TurboPatent about the valuation of the portfolio, Search Marketing Daily has learned, though Billmaier declined to name the companies.

While advertisers and their agency partners might not want to license or purchase Yahoo's IP portfolio of 2,653 patents and applications, it's important for them to understand the validity of the portfolio and track the companies showing interest in the technology.

The summary of the full report includes details on patents and applications in the Excalibur portfolio.