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Owner of Nortel Patents Sues Cisco For 'Immense' Patent Infringement
jfruh (300774) writes "The venerable Nortel Networks may have vanished into bankruptcy five years ago, but thanks to U.S. patent law, it can strike back at its old rival Cisco from beyond the grave. Spherix, a Virginia-based 'research company' that bought Nortel's patents in 2009, has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Cisco has been knowingly violating 11 Nortel patents. 'The vast majority of Cisco's switching and routing revenue from March 2008 until the present is and has been generated by products and services implementing technology that infringes the Asserted Patents,' the lawsuit claims."
americans acquire it, now its being used for evil instead of progress
go america
You'd forgive me for thinking it was Rockstar suing Cisco, which would be humorous as all hell.
Go go gadget Patent Trolls..
a Virginia-based 'research company'
"ABOUT SPHERIX Spherix is committed to advancing innovation by active participation in all areas of the patent market" -http://spherix.com/
That sure doesn't sound like they're even pretending to be a research company they're patent trolls plain as day says it right on the first page of the site
Proof that patent chests don't work. If some non-practicing entity acquires the patents, your war chest doesn't help. What is Cisco going to do, sue Nortel for infringement (since there is apparently no formal cross-licensing agreement), and try to get those debts applied to the current patent holders, to cancel out their suit?
This is a good thing, as it will help prove the downfall of the current patent system. When you can get the big patent holders scared of other patent holders, we can get some progress in trimming the power of the vague and obvious patent.
Learn to love Alaska
Am I suppose to feel sorry for Cisco?
If the accusation is true then Cisco should have licensed the patents from Nortel or Rockstar prior to the 2009 acquisition by Spherix.
I assume I'm suppose to go "oh noes... a patent troll!" but that would mean letting Cisco off the hook.
It's still a valid patent.
yet most of us would be hard pressed to remember a case in which it was successfully asserted. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_%28equity%29) Are we to believe that it took Spherix five years to check whether the world's largest manufacturer of network products was violating their patents? Assuming that Cisco is in fact infringing those Nortel patents, justice in this case would be served if they got an award based no more than six months worth of Cisco's sales of the products cited by Spherix.
Nortel needed a Double Tap, ALA Zombieland!
Without delving into the specifics of the patents, I have mixed feelings about patent litigation...
Spherix paid for the all rights to these patents. In theory, this money went back to Nortel creditors (and maybe people who had expected to draw a Nortel pension). If they paid fair market value for legitimate patents, why shouldn't they be able to enforce them.
Once you accept the notion of patents in the first place (as a temporary monopoly on something in return for disclosing it instead of keeping it secret), it's a very small jump to buying and selling them. If an independent inventor comes up with an idea but doesn't have the capital to bring it to market, they can sell the patent to a bigger company.
This is fine in and of itself. Even patent trolls would be fine if the patents they were holding were actually valid and the companies they were suing had in fact copied the idea from the published patent.
The problems are twofold:
1) If someone else comes up with the same idea totally independently, it should invalidate the patent as too obvious.
2) Patents have been granted for things that should never have received them. In particular people have been allowed to patent *concepts* rather than *specific ways to implement a concept*.
Patent sales like this one should be forbidden. Nortel was a practicing entity that used patents defensively as a Mutually Assured Destruction weapon. Selling this weapon to a non-practicing entity who is happy to use patents offensively with no fear of consequences would be akin to selling Ukrainian nuclear weapons to Al-Qaeda back in 1994.
The big problem is that these patent trolls have nothing to lose. There's no way a company can reach a cross-licensing deal since the patent troll produces no products and is otherwise just a parasite with no redeeming qualities.
I think that if a patent is traded or sold that the recipient of the patent must either produce similar products that either use the same or a related technology to what the patent covers or if they don't produce anything they have a limited time, say 3 years, in which to produce a product otherwise the patent goes to the public domain.
Hey, I should patent this idea!
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
It purchased the Nortel patents from the Rockstar Consortium, which had acquired a large collection of patents for US$4.5 billion after Nortel went bankrupt in 2009.
Some questions:
Q. How did SPHERIX afford to pay for the patents?
A. Spherix Incorporated, a company originally founded by Gilbert Levin, has acquired four families of mobile communication patents from the Rockstar Consortium in exchange for initial consideration of up-front cash and Spherix common stock.[6] Rockstar will also receive a percentage of future profits from Spherix after recovery of patent monetization costs and an initial priority return on investment to Spherix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Consortium
Q. Haven't I heard of Rockstar before?
A. Members of the consortium are Apple, Inc., BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Consortium
Q. So this is a shakedown?
A. Youbetyourass!
http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/...
IMHO, this is what's so insidiously wrong about the patent system. Spherix didn't actually invent the stuff. They didn't do the work. The invention didn't come from the brains of the people who work there. IMHO, therefore, they should have no standing for a patent lawsuit.
Huawei or whatever its called has probably been violating a zillion patents without paying a cent but it's ok for them. They're an Asian company.
Why are patents transferable in this fashion? If the owner goes bankrupt or dies, all that stuff should become public domain.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I wish I had mod points. Since Microsoft and friends own Rockstar, and Rockstar owns Spherix, really it's Apple, Microsoft, etc. patent trolling via two shell companies.
I think it would have been really interesting to see what happened if the republicans had responded:
Sounds great. Let's do even better - let's set minimum wage at $100 / hour.
Then let OBAMA explain why that would result in almost everyone losing their jobs, why higher minimum wage means fewer jobs.
That's sound reasoning, but you got the facts backwards. Rockstar aka Spherix is Microsoft, Apple, and a few other companies. The big tech companies looked at the patents and BOUGHT THEM through their patent-trolling joint venture, Rockstar.
I thought Apple and some other tech companies bought the Nortel patents.
I'm curious about which patents are being asserted. The news items somehow never get around to listing the patent numbers or describing them.
(I worked for a router company when Nortel was sinking and suing everybody who did anythig with SONET for infringement, in a desperate attempt to come up with enough money to avoid going under. Very much like a drowning person dragging others down. Some of my inventions (including patented ones) were in a chip that had something to do with SONET, so I (and other designers on the project) were called in to explain how the way WE did things didn't infringe these particular paptents. My stuff didn't infringe, IMHO, though I don't know about other people's. Nevertheless, the company settled the suit by cutting a cross-license deal (incuding paying them a few million because Nortel had more patents).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Avaya bought Nortel some years ago. (2009) But Nortel patents was bought by RockStar ( Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry and Sony) which sold a portion of its patents to Spherix Inc (2013). Now Spherix sues Cisco. It is interesting to see how the patents business goes.
http://happycard.vn/
Good point. Just like that corrupt mechanic said that my car was low on oil, but he sure changed his tune when I told him to prove it by putting 10 gallons of oil in! You and me are GENIUSES!