When Apple, Microsoft and four other technology companies spent $4.5 billion on the patent collection of bankrupt telecommunications giant Nortel nearly a year ago, the big question was where all that intellectual property would end up.
Wired's Robert McMillan today clears that up in a feature about Rockstar Bidco, the consortium comprising Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Sony, which successfully beat out a team consisting of Google and Intel for the collection last June.
The company, which now goes simply by the name of Rockstar, has control of 4,000 of the 6,000 patents and patent applications originally purchased as part of the Nortel sale. And according to McMillan, its new role is to continuously investigate whether anyone's infringing on the technology:
Called the Rockstar Consortium, the 32-person outfit has a single-minded mission: It examines successful products, like routers and smartphones, and it tries to find proof that these products infringe on a portfolio of over 4,000 technology patents once owned by one of the world's largest telecommunications companies.
When an infringing element is found, Rockstar then seeks out a licensi... [Read more]
via CNET http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/NnTv/~3/SFBfwehLnNM/
No comments:
Post a Comment