Ford and the Patent Trolls

Back in 2014, Ford Motor Co. in San Francisco was sued 107 times for patent infringement by patent trolls. In fact, the numbers have been rolling up in the last 5 years - there were only 17 patent infringement lawsuits from trolls agains Ford back in 2009.

As a means to solve this rising problem, Ford recently signed a contract with RPX Corp., a type of open-source company. RPX claims to have over 200 companies signed and helps protect those companies from NPE litigation. Interestingly enough, RPX functions similarly to patent trolls in that they buy patents from the open market, but they claim to put their patents to good use. RPX removes "patents from circulation before they can become costly problem for [their] clients."

Other companies within RPX's member portfolio include Samsung, Intel, and Microsoft.


At the moment, RPX's patent portfolio predominantly includes information technology, but this may prove increasingly useful to Ford and other automotive companies in the next few years as cars are beginning to rely more heavily on software.


This won't be the first time in history that Ford has stood up to patent trolls. George Selden, a patent troll, began filing lawsuits against patent infringement around 1900 against companies like Cadillac, Packard, and Ford. All of the companies settled out of court with the exception of Ford. Henry Ford fought the lawsuit and won.