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Nokia Feeds a Patent Troll

Posted by Soulskill on from the om-nom-nom dept.

New submitter glebovitz writes "In case anyone missed the other Nokia news: on the same day they announced the sale of Qt to Digia, they also sold 500 patents to Vringo. Vringo, a video ring tone company, recently merged with patent portfolio company Innovate/Protect which includes Donald Stout, the founder of patent holding company NTP, on its board. Forbes refers to NTP as 'a patent troll which milked Research In Motion for $612.5 million in a patent infringement settlement reached in 2006.' As Eric Savitz writes in the article, 'Vringo decided to basically turn itself into a patent troll.'"

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:WTF by Bookwyrm · · Score: 5, Funny

    WTF is a "video ring tone company"?

    You need to pay the license fee in order to obtain the proprietary information which compromises the patented answer to that question.

  2. This was done at Microsoft's behest by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We all know that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is a sockpuppet of Steve Ballmer (why the Nokia shareholders put up with this is beyond me, but it probably reflects the lack of actual control over corporate governance by the nominal owners). Now Elop is taking yet more actions that don't really help Nokia, but are calculated to hurt Google (and probably Apple as well) as much as possible. The reason is obvious: Microsoft wants these Nokia patents in the hands of patent trolls to cause trouble.

  3. Re:how long till the lawsuits start flying? by radiumsoup · · Score: 5, Informative

    different lawsuit - Vringo has sued Google for patents owned from a previous merger not related to the Nokia patents... but it does support the idea of Vringo going after patent infringements for a primary source of revenue.