Google, Rockstar to bury zombie Nortel patent lawsuit Google has reportedly laid to rest its long-running squabble with zombie patent supertroll Rockstar, although terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Rockstar is the puerile moniker given to the consortium formed by Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony, which pooled their resources in 2011 to buy the patent …
No, it is evolution at its finest.
Original trolls were usually small entities, a couple of bottom feeding sharks and a PO Box. Not something that could take on large prey and succeed. They fed on other small prey, occasionally striking lucky by biting a chunk of meat out of something large. Even when biting large prey they could at most annoy it, not really hurt it.
Rockstar however, is no bottom feeding shark. The bottom feeders have evolved into apex predators now. This is a Megalodon. It has access to technical expertise, resources, proper lawyers and is capable of taking on large prey.
Continuing the analogy with paleo-life - once an apex predator evolves, only a major change in the environment will remove it from its place in the food chain. Like it or not, unless the IPR laws change we have now entered the age of the supertrolls and the supertrolls are here to stay.
Just because Cisco ended up settling for a nine figure amount doesn't mean the Google or Android OEMs will end up paying that much. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but Nortel was primarily a networking company. There's a lot more overlap with Cisco's business than with Android. The main exception being that Nortel held a lot of patents applicable to GSM and LTE.
Those GSM patents were probably in a FRAND pool, but the patents applicable to LTE might have missed out on such a pool, as Nortel was busy being bankrupt when the LTE standard and patent pool were formulated. I think however that Apple purchased those patents directly from Rockstar so they could defend against the kind of FRAND patent battles Motorola was trying to fight against them a couple years ago. I read somewhere that Apple owns 5% of the LTE FRAND patent pool, which is pretty remarkable considering they had little involvement in the standards creation process.
Rockstar had two other major groups in its make-up: the Nortel legal department and engineers.
(Which made it look to this non-business expert as a restructuring funded by folks who wanted to explore various degrees of thermonuclear war over the Android phones.)
There was also a successor company. Rockstar I — my designation — funded as you indicated, who bought the patents from its leaders' former employer. A second Rockstar was formed in order to exploit the ip. The ownership breakdown got very hard to determine at that point, with management (former Nortel people) only acknowledging that the Apples, etc., had some ownership.
The partners, whether silent or private advisors, were what allowed Rockstar to say that, technically, they were not an NPE.
Just to fill in some details. It still was about going after Google and it is rather pointless to explore the nuance as to who had the idea and who had the dough.
We also recall that Google bid on the Nortel patents and their bids were transcendental numbers x 10^9. If the settlement plus legal costs were less than their bids, they came out ahead for losing.
Watch Flash of Genius and tell me what Google and the like wasn't EVIL. You guys are being ridiculous. Patents ARE INVENTIONS. And the smart people that invented things deserve to REAP the rewards. Nortel were a bunch of inventors! They continue with Rockstar. They made the world a better place and you best recognize that. Google ripped them off. And several other follow suit. God bless a justice system that can recognize that and force this type of settlement. Google should pay every dime they have to Rockstar. Its not just Android. Its their advertising business! It was invented and patented by Nortel. Google ripped it off and has made 100's of billions of dollars off that invention. You are a moron if you think Google is in the right here.
Although I understand and appreciate the use of patents the whole system seems to be a total mess.
Where there were a few thousand patents deciding if you might have invented something that someone else had already patended was probably not too hard. IF you had money.
But today, with millions of patents and the USA allowing patents on Software! (O.M.G What a stupid idea) the whole thing has become an utter farce.
Only the largest companies with bottomless pockets can now fish in this pond.
I think patents should have a max term of 10 years to monetise them.
A Similar thing should be done with copyright. 10 years AFTER the death ofthe copyrtight owner. No more...
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