“The Rockstar Consortium, a group comprised of Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony, will see a windfall on its 2011 purchase of some 4,000 patents from Canadian tech giant Nortel, with Apple expected to gain at least $392 million from the holding, one analyst says,” MacNN reports. “Wells Fargo’s Maynard Um has used BlackBerry’s reported gain of 17 percent of a base figure in predicting Apple’s share of the profits.”
“The companies, some of whom are now suing each other over other matters, banded together to keep a Google-led consortium from getting the patents,” MacNN reports, “fearing that the company would use them as a bargaining chip to protect itself over litigation threats stemming from its Android operating system, which copied large portions of Oracle’s Java and lifted the look and feel of Apple’s iOS (having originally modeled itself on BlackBerry’s OS).”
“Rockstar was able to win a total of about 6,000 telecommunications patents, of which it has since sold around a third, with a $4.5 billion bid,” MacNN reports. “The remaining 4,000 or so were sold to a patent holding aggregator called RPX in December, presumably with a permanent licensing agreement in place. RPX is said to have paid around $900 million for the assets, but the members of Rockstar are entitled to a percentage of future royalties.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A drop in the bucket vs. what was stolen and continues to be stolen and peddled to the ignorati by IP thieves and patent/trade dress infringers the world over.
From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: It’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character. – Steve Jobs
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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