AppleInsider Staff
Rockstar Consortium — Â the patent holding firm created by Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony to purchase thousands of foundational telecom patents from now-defunct Nortel — looks set to wind down operations after the partners agreed to sell much of Rockstar's patent portfolio to IP risk mitigation company RPX.
The sale will see RPX pay some $900 million for more than 4,000 patents, according to the Wall Street Journal. It will include "the bulk" of Rockstar's portfolio, though it remains unclear which patents will be held back and how they will be disposed of.
As part of the agreement, Rockstar will also end all ongoing litigation, including suits against South Korean firms Samsung and LG, Taiwan's HTC, and China's Huawei.
RPX is a publicly-traded patent consortium that purchases and licenses patents on behalf of its members — Â which include Google and Cisco, among others — who can then leverage the portfolio to defend themselves against infringement allegations. RPX has pledged not to use the cache for offensive action.
"This is the biggest syndicate of its kind and its formation proves that companies can actually collaborate in...cooperative licensing at scale," RPX CEO John Amster said in a statement to the Journal.
Rockstar's partners paid $4.5 billion for over 6,000 Nortel patents in 2011, divvying up 2,000 of the most important patents among themselves and leaving Rockstar to work out licensing deals for the remainder. The patents assigned directly to the partners are not included in the sale to RPX.
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Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
39 Comments
Total nonsense.
Agreed. It's time for some major reforms in patent law.
So if RPX is purchasing them, are they essentially a patent troll company? I don't get the benefit of them purchasing the bulk of these patents. Are they purchasing them to police others and manage the licensing of said patents? Can someone explain to me their pledge of "not using the cache for offensive action"... I mean... for them to spend 900 million on this and it just sit there doesn't seem right. I shake my head at all this... I'm a pretty smart guy, but I don't understand a lot of the passing back and forth of these patents for the ungodly amount of money just to sit on it. I assume in the end its all about litigation protection? Meanwhile, I would really enjoy a few grand to furnish my new apartment. lol.
Ugh!
It seems like a great thing that tech companies can cooperate to try to defend themselves from uncertainty and risk from patents without waiting for government action. But Apple would probably benefit more than any other big tech company from simply getting rid of patents altogether, since they're already pretty good at using secrecy to get a big first mover advantage. You'd have to legislate "no new patents" after some date, though, and just live with the old ones until they expire: it wouldn't be fair to simply declare trillions of dollars of existing patent assets as worthless, and that would cause too much resistance to the change. Not sure what to do about pharmaceutical patents.