This is the country that once awarded a Texan company a patent on Basmati rice; closer to the financial world, Cantor Fitzgerald’s eSpeed subsidiary bought the Wagner Patent covering electronic trading and used it to get some money out of various US exchanges. I always thought this was odd, because Europe had been trading electronically for years before this. Anyway, Icap has agreed to acquire the transactions division of Ocean Tomo for $10 million.
“Patent brokerage is an exciting new field that will help to provide a marketplace and access to liquidity for an asset that has historically not been served by a vibrant trading market. It offers participants new opportunities to monetize intellectual property and to diversify investment portfolios with a new non-correlated asset type,” says Michael Spencer, Icap’s chief executive. I would express it differently if only I’d bought that patent on libel I was offered a few years back.