Joining the international non-profit community is an important step in ensuring the health of the AI community

LOT Network, the international community of the world’s leading high-tech companies committed to protecting its members from costly litigation from patent assertion entities (PAEs, also known as “patent trolls”), announced today that Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888), a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation, has joined LOT’s 2,600+ member community. With this proactive measure, Baidu aims to protect their business against potential litigation from PAEs, by immunizing themselves from a pool of more than 3.6 million patents within LOT.

Founded in 2000 as a search engine platform, Baidu has been an early adopter of artificial intelligence since 2010. Today, Baidu is a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation and one of a few companies in the world that offers a full AI stack, deep learning framework, core AI capabilities – such as natural language processing, knowledge graph, speech recognition, computer vision and augmented reality, as well as an open AI platform to facilitate wide application and use. The company has since unveiled a series of autonomous driving technology breakthroughs including the industry’s first AI big model built for autonomous driving as well as plans to establish the world’s largest fully driverless ride-hailing service area in 2023.

“Since its founding, Baidu has held innovation and technology at its core, and PAE litigation has the potential to steer us from that focus,” said Cui Lingling, Head of Baidu’s Patent Department. “Joining LOT Network allows us to devote more resources to building products and services for our customers – like our suite of AI products, intelligent driving technologies, search engine platform, and more – and our users can have the best experience possible without any disruption of service. We are confident that an ounce of protection is worth millions in potential patent litigation brought on by PAEs.”

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“As more Chinese companies look to expand their business globally, it will be imperative for them to develop a holistic IP strategy especially if they want to expand their growth into the US and Europe,” said Ken Seddon, CEO of LOT Network. “Many IP professionals believe that Europe has the potential to become a hotbed for PAE activity because, when the Unified Patent Court (UPC) comes on-line, it will put all companies – including Chinese enterprises – more at risk of litigation.”

Seddon continues, “Baidu’s commitment to protecting their innovation, as well as their entire ecosystem, from the potential threat of litigation by PAEs is commendable. They can now assure their shareholders, business partners as well as their customers that they’re focused less on lawsuits and more on tech development.”

Baidu has filed more than 40,000 patent applications globally, with approximately 17,000 published AI-related patent applications in China alone – the highest in the country. Baidu, and all LOT Network members, agree that if any member’s patent assets fall into the hands of a PAE, the company provides a license to all other network members, thereby immunizing them against PAE litigation from those assets.

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