Tech heavyweights team up to fend off patent lawsuits
Several major U.S. technology companies are collaborating to buy up patents in a move aimed at warding off lawsuits for intellectual-property infringement.
Telecom firms Verizon Communications, Ericsson and Cisco Systems, as well as Google and computer-maker Hewlett-Packard will each pay $250,000 to join a venture called Allied Security Trust and another $5 million toward future patent purchases, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The venture aims to purchase the rights to intellectual property that could be used against the companies in patent-infringement lawsuits. Once acquired, the patents would be licensed to the companies on a non-exclusive basis and then sold, so that the venture's members wouldn't have to fear potentially costly IP litigation down the road.
The companies worry they could be the victims of so-called patent trolls, businesses that enforce patents — sometimes purchased from bankrupt third parties — for technologies they have no plans to manufacture or market.
In one of the most high-profile cases involving an alleged patent troll, NTP Inc. of Virginia sued Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry wireless device, for intellectual property infringement in 2000.
NTP won its lawsuit and threatened to shut down the BlackBerry network in the United States, forcing RIM to pay $612 million US in 2006 to settle the claim.
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