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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."
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
at least cisco is a company that does something, delivers products and or services...
the part of capitalism that we can all agree is necessary
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.
Spherix aquired some of the patents from Rockstar last year
And then they did 'research' - "Let's go through these things and see if we can sue any really big companies for biggie whopper zorkmids!"
Thank you USPTO Lottery!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Right-ism that "attracts low-information voters with buzzwords and sounds bites like" socialism and "destroying America".
Still have my same insurance BTW.
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*.
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!
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.