American worldwide patent risk management services provider RPX Corporation made an announcement on Tuesday that the company will purchase 4,000 patents from Rockstar Consortium, Ars Technica reports
Rockstar Consortium Inc., formerly known as Rockstar Bidco comprised of five well-known companies, Microsoft, Apple, Ericsson, Sony and Blackberry, spent a hefty amount of $4.5 billion to acquire 6,000 patents from Nortel, a bankrupt Canadian multinational telco and manufacturer of data networking equipment.
Now, since Rockstar Consortium may be retiring for being a so-called "patent-holding-company, it is said that it agreed selling mass of its patent to San Francisco-based RPX Corporation for $900 million, far lesser than what they have paid for when they acquired it from Nortel Networks. It is said that before Rockstar made the sale, 2,000 out of 6,000 patents were already disseminated among its members.
Good thing though for some as several of these 4,000 patents have disputes against numerous phone manufacturers which will likely put an end to it.
It can be recalled that Rockstar filed an infringement patent complaint against Google and its Android partners that includes the Korean-based tech giant Samsung in October 2013. Both parties decided to settle the dispute via execution of binding term sheet in an undisclosed term last month, November 2014.
As cited by CNBC, the San Francisco-based patent risk management provider will license all of these patents bought from Rockstar Consortium for more that 30 companies, under "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms," that includes Cisco Systems and Google.
According to reports, RPX paid $35 million, Cisco made a $188 million payment while Google's paid purchase is an undisclosed one.