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Rockstar Consortium and the Nortel patents

Rockstar Consortium (previously Rockstar Bidco) is a patent aggression company created by Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson and Sony,[1] with Apple being the majority shareholder.[2]

It has 4,000 patents which were bought from Nortel, a telecommunications equipment manufacturer that went bankrupt. Nortel originally obtained those patents for defensive purposes,[3] so this goes to show that "defensive" patents can easily become aggressive patents.

Rockstar later sold a minority of these patents to Spherix, who went on to accuse Cisco of infringement.[4] Rockstar received Spherix common stock as part of the deal, so they have an interest in Spherix getting as much money from Cisco as possible, and they probably knew Spherix's plans (they probably wouldn't acquire Spherix stock without hearing the business model), so they could be see as litigation-by-proxy.

Reported demise in 2014

Mark Radcliffe gave this summary in January 2015:[5]

Rockstar Consortium threat evaporates

The Rockstar Consortium was formed by Microsoft, Blackberry, Ericsson, Sony, and Apple to exploit the 6,000 patents from Nortel Networks. The Rockstar Consortium sued Google for infringement of the Android operating system. This litigation was aimed at fundamental functions of the Android operating system and could have had a significant effect on the Android ecosystem. The Rockstar Consortium settled its litigation with Google this year, but then sold 4,000 of its patents to RPX, the patent defense firm (financed by a number of companies as well as RPX). The remaining patents were distributed to the members of the Rockstar Consortium.

Related pages on ESP Wiki

External links

News selection

Newest first:

Spherix sues Cisco for 'immense' patent infringement], 25 March 2014, itworld

References