“Bloomberg reports: ‘RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, is weighing an offer that would keep Google from gaining control of about 6,000 Nortel patents and patent applications, said the people, who couldn’t be identified because the plans aren’t public.’ Sources claim that ‘a group of technology companies, including mobile-phone makers,’ may also join the fray to keep Google from laying its hands on Nortel’s patent chest,” Christian Zibreg reports for The Motley Fool. “John Paczkowski of The Wall Street Journal‘s “Digital Daily” blog wrote last December that Nokia, Apple, Google, and RIMM were all participating in the auction.”

“Patents are everything in the technology industry, and even more so in a sue-happy place like Silicon Valley,” Zibreg reports. “Whoever wins the bid gets to control thousands of wireless patents said to be worth an estimated $1 billion. Clearly, there are people willing to pay big bucks to own Nortel’s intellectual property as a shield from infringement lawsuits.”

Zibreg reports, “Should Apple get them, the company could theoretically seek royalties from everyone else in the industry while creating a disincentive for others to sue Apple, to paraphrase Google’s counsel. This might be especially unpleasant for Android handset makers, as Google’s open-sourced software is said to be a patent bomb waiting to explode.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Fred Mertz" for the heads up.]