Industry Intellectual Property Founder Alexander I. Poltorak Type of business Private | Website www.generalpatent.com Founded 1987 | |
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Key people Alexander I. Poltorak, Chairman & CEO
Michael Shanahan, Vice President & General Counsel
Alec Schibanoff, Vice President of Marketing
Kathlene Ingham, Director of Licensing
Advisory Board of Directors
Bruce Lehman
Jack Granowitz Products Patent licensing and enforcement
Intellectual property consulting and advisory services
Intellectual property brokerage Headquarters Suffern, New York, United States Subsidiaries Digital Technology Licensing LLC | ||
Patent enforcement from general patent corporation
General Patent Corporation (GPC) is an intellectual property (IP) firm headquartered in Suffern, New York that provides patent licensing and enforcement on a contingency basis. GPC also provides IP advisory services including strategy, management, patent portfolio mining, patent triage, technology transfer, and other IP-related services. The company has been privately held since it was founded in 1987 by Alexander Poltorak to assist inventors and IP owners in licensing and enforcing their IP rights. The company was incorporated in 1989.
Since 1996, GPC has been actively licensing and enforcing a portfolio of “smart connector” patents. In 1997, GPC filed two patent infringement suits against IBM and U.S. Robotics in the Southern District of New York and Against Hayes and seven modem manufacturers in the Central District of California. In 1998 GPC sued Motorola. All defendants settled by taking a license under the patents.
In 2000, GPC spun off the “smart connector” business into a wholly owned subsidiary, Acticon Technologies LLC. To date, after winning patent reexamination proceeding at the USPTO and successfully litigating 26 patent infringement lawsuits, GPC licensed the Acticon "smart connector" patents to more than 150 companies. GPCI successfully represented Moen Technologies LLC in its litigation against The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo; Forward Technologies LLC vs. SBC Communications; Scieran Technologies, Inc. vs. Bausch & Lomb; Trounson Automation LLC vs. Yaskawa et al., Leighton Technologies LLC vs. Oberthur, and many other patent infringement cases.
The idea incubator was spun off in 2000 as IP Holdings LLC, which later became the financial arm of GPC. In the 2007-2009 period, AT&T, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, LG, Motorola, T-Mobile, and Samsung all settled patent infringement lawsuits and agreed to license a key cellphone patent from Digital Technology Licensing LLC a subsidiary of GPC.