The more I read, the better I feel. WHEN WILL AUGUST BE OVER????
...In other words, filing for patents was once a defensive strategy. Now accumulating patents is a tool for offensive attack
...One single smartphone -- like an iPhone or an Samsung's best-selling Galaxy S II, an Android-based phone -- can involve as many as 250,000 patent claims, according to Google.
...more than 17,000 patents...Motorola's portfolio, despite its large size, is filled with patents that have already been licensed out to its rivals
...By contrast, the Nortel patents were particularly valuable because they lacked licensing commitments: Nortel's previous business agreements got cleared away in its bankruptcy. (In advance of the Nortel auction, Microsoft claimed its own Nortel licenses should survive any ownership transfer on the patents. It's a legal gray area, and a point that became moot when Microsoft became one of the winning bidders.)
All of this means that for the moment, patents are the tech industry's unobtainium: an incredibly valuable resource companies will throw around mind-boggling sums to control.
Kodak and InterDigital spent decades building multi-billion-dollar businesses with thousands of employees and lots of tangible, real-world assets. But in the end, their most valuable possession may be the stacks of paper they control in the U.S. Patent Office's filing cabinets.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/18/technology/patent_bubble/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote
"The world is a dangerous place to live�not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." �Albert Einstein
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