“In many ways, Scott Widdowson is your typical electrical engineer,” Robert McMillan reports for Wired. “But Widdowson is a specialist. He’s one of 10 reverse-engineers working full time for a stealthy company funded by some of the biggest names in technology: Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, and Ericsson.”
“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,” McMillan reports. “When a Rockstar engineer uncovers evidence of infringement, the company documents it, contacts the manufacturer, and demands licensing fees for the patents in question. The demand is backed by the implicit threat of a patent lawsuit in federal court.”
“Rockstar has its roots in last year’s high-profile auction of 6,000 patents owned by the bankrupt Canadian telco giant Nortel,” McMillan reports. ” The final sale price was $4.5 billion, and Rockstar Bidco, as it was then called, was the winner. Since then, Rockstar Bidco has given way to a new entity, called Rockstar Consortium. And for the first time, the consortium’s strategy for the Nortel patents is clear. Ownership of about 2,000 of the patents was shifted to the individual companies that won the auction: Apple, Microsoft, et al. But the remaining 4,000 have been transferred to Rockstar Consortium, which is now a pure patent exploitation operation funded by all of the winning bidders except EMC, which has dropped out of the picture, according to Veschi. Rockstar is a special kind of company. Because it doesn’t actually make anything, it can’t be countersued in patent cases.
Tons more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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