Intellectual property is the most valuable asset of a company that is why it should always be protected. Otherwise, employees come in and learn all your systems and processes, and then they leave. The next thing you realize, there’s a competitor down the road that is being run by that former employee. However, many companies don’t do a good job of securing their intellectual property because they don’t understand that. Art Nutter, the founder, chairman, and CEO of PatentBooks and a company called TAEUS, delves deep into the subject of intellectual property, bringing to light the significance of patents. He also shares how PatentBooks and TAEUS were created and what they are all about.

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How To Protect Your Intellectual Property with Art Nutter

We have Art Nutter. He’s the Founder, Chairman and CEO of https://patentbooksinc.com/ (PatentBooks) and a company called https://taeus.com/ (TAEUS). People will go, “PatentBooks, I got. What is TAEUS?”

People think it’s some Greek god of knowledge. I was going to invent that, but it’s an acronym for Take Apart Everything Under the Sun. That company was one that I started back in 1992 when the United States and big companies were thinking that foreign competition was copying their intellectual property. I approached ATandT one day and said, “You acquired NCR. Do you know what patents you acquired in that acquisition?” They said, “No.” I said, “I can tell you.” We proceeded to do that and turned to ATandT and then subsequently IBM into patent licensing powerhouses. IBM went from $100 million licensing income to $2 billion in licensing income over the space of ten years.”

I think about that and say, “You started TAEUS.”

Yes, I did. Out of the garage with frequent flyer miles, a laptop computer, a laser printer and that was it.

Did you have experience in patent or anything or taking things apart?

Yes, I’ve always taken things apart. We grew up on a farm. If something broke, we had to figure out how to fix it. I’ve had an inherent interest and curiosity in doing those things. However, the last job I had as an employee before I started TAEUS, I tended to get fired in most companies because I was usually the guy making too much money. That was my crime. I doubled the sales of this particular company in a space of nine months. This company was reverse engineering semiconductor memory chips. I discovered that there was a marketplace that was very interested in this reverse engineering data. That was this intellectual property marketplace because like I said in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, US companies were thinking, “We’re getting killed by foreign competition. They must be copying our stuff, our ideas and our inventions.” In fact, they were and this was an easy way for them to document the other companies copying of their circuits. They literally would reverse engineer the circuits and then duplicate them exactly. It was government-funded in Japan and Korea and Taiwan and so forth. They wanted to establish semiconductor industries for themselves, which as from history, our semiconductor industry is pretty few and far between. You have the Intels, AMDs and in-house semiconductor capabilities but nowhere near likely the volume of semiconductor companies that did exist in here in the 1980s. Those businesses are now done overseas in Asia.

I’m thinking about you started out with your laptop in your garage and you get called to ATandT. Walk us through the thought process of, “I’m going to start small. I’m going to start with ATandT.”

It was very straightforward. I only have so many hours in the day. I figured that if I’m going to spend my time working with one guy who has one patent or ten patents or something like that,