Patent Troll Now Armed With Thousands of Nortel Patents

dgharmon writes in with a story about the final outcome of thousands of Nortel patents that were bought last July. "You may recall last summer that Apple, Microsoft, EMC, RIM, Ericsson and Sony all teamed up to buy Nortel's patents for $4.5 billion. They beat out a team of Google and Intel who bid a bit less. While there was some antitrust scrutiny over the deal, it was dropped and the purchase went through. Apparently, the new owners picked off a bunch of patents to transfer to themselves... and then all (minus EMC, who, one hopes, was horrified by the plans) decided to support a massive new patent troll armed with the remaining 4,000 patents. The company is called Rockstar Consortium, and it's run by the folks who used to run Nortel's patent licensing program anyway — but now employs people whose job it is to just find other companies to threaten." On a semi-related note, there is a new petition to the White House to make a law that patent lawsuits that find for the defendant automatically fine the plaintiff three times the damages they were seeking."

Comments

Re:What did anyone think was going to happen?

[ozmanjusri]

So the question to the submitter is: what other outcome did you expect?

Actually, a lot of us predicted this, but were drowned out by the flood of astroturf that's overwhelming Slashdot.

This is SOP for Microsoft. They have zero interest in spending money developing new products or improving their existing lines and every interest in killing off any competition that might force them to spend that money.