A consortium of companies, consisting of Apple, RIM, Microsoft, Ericsson, Sony and EMC, agreed last week to pay $4.5 billion for about 6000 patents owned by Nortel, or roughly $750,000 per patent. I think it is fair to say that this was a lot more than most thought the portfolio would fetch.
Nortel, which is going through bankruptcy, put its 6000+ patents up for sale in April. (Press release). According to Nortel, the portfolio covered wireless, wireless 4G, data networking, optical, voice, internet, service provider, semiconductors and other things, touching “nearly every aspect of telecommunications and additional markets as well, including Internet search and social networking.” Google had started the bidding with a stalking horse bid of $900 million for the portfolio, or roughly $150,000 per patent.
There has been a lot of reaction to the winning bid — some meaningful, but most of it just typical anti-patent diatribe, over-reaction or uninformed opinion. I’d put the comments of Eric Schmitd, Executive Chairman of Google, as reported by the Financial Times, in the meaningful category:
“Now that the value of patents appears to have increased a great deal based on these data points, there are lots of people that have patents that are available,” Mr Schmidt said. “We have a lot of patents. If the answer is tonnage, I think we’ll be fine.”
via Google chief voices fears on patents race – FT.com.
I don’t know if individual patents are worth more, but the sale appears to prove that having a lot of related ones can definitely be worth a lot to some businesses.
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