{"id":4935,"date":"2012-05-26T15:23:14","date_gmt":"2012-05-26T20:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=4935"},"modified":"2013-11-06T13:37:11","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T18:37:11","slug":"how-apple-and-microsoft-armed-4000-patent-warheads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/26\/how-apple-and-microsoft-armed-4000-patent-warheads\/","title":{"rendered":"How Apple and Microsoft Armed 4,000 Patent Warheads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredenterprise\/2012\/05\/rockstar\/all\/1\">Wired<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredenterprise\/2012\/05\/rockstar\/all\/1\">\r\n<p>Rockstar is a special kind of company. Because it doesn&rsquo;t actually make anything, it can&rsquo;t be countersued in patent cases. That wouldn&rsquo;t be the case with Apple or Microsoft if they had kept the patents for themselves. And because it&rsquo;s independent, it can antagonize its owners&rsquo; partners and customers in ways that its owner companies could not.<\/p>\r\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\r\n<p>When the Rockstar Bidco group purchased Nortel&#8217;s patents, the U.S. Department of Justice took a look at the deal, as part of a broader investigation into several large technology patent sales. The DoJ was concerned that patent attacks might somehow be used to knock Rockstar&#8217;s competitors out of the smartphone or tablet market. But in February, the DoJ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.justice.gov\/opa\/pr\/2012\/February\/12-at-210.html\">closed its investigation<\/a>, in part because Microsoft and Apple had promised to license many of their core wireless patents under reasonable terms to anyone who needed them.<\/p>\r\n<p>But the new company &#8212; Rockstar Consortium &#8212; isn&#8217;t bound by the promises that its member companies made, according to Veschi. &#8220;We are separate,&#8221; he says. &#8220;That does not apply to us.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n<p>Collecting patents defensively is understandable; forming a patent troll is evil.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wired: Rockstar is a special kind of company. Because it doesn&rsquo;t actually make anything, it can&rsquo;t be countersued in patent cases. That wouldn&rsquo;t be the case with Apple or Microsoft if they had kept the patents for themselves. And because it&rsquo;s independent, it can antagonize its owners&rsquo; partners and customers in ways that its owner [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[38,209,37,40,676],"class_list":["post-4935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-legal","tag-microsoft","tag-patents","tag-rockstar-consortium"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4935"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8185,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4935\/revisions\/8185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}