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Several tech companies decided to team up and reduce the
number of infringement lawsuits that cost them millions of dollars. The idea is to purchase patents for
technologies all members of the “Allied Security Trust” are planning on using,
but things won’t come cheap.
According to The
Wall Street Journal, the companies will pay around $250,000 to join the
organization, and around $5 million more as a deposit for future patent
purchases, which means only the big names will afford to join.
Among the members of the Allied Security Trust, the names of
Verizon Communications, Google, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, Motorola, Sun
Microsystems came up, but the invitations are open (for those who can afford it).
The recent years have brought a number a lawsuits that got
big companies (which are the most targeted) wondering how they can prevent
that. This is especially important for them, as acquiring intellectual property
to extract royalties from others is a thriving business at the moment.
A large number of companies, called “patent trolls,” choose
to “feed” on patent infringement lawsuits, despite the fact that they do not
operate in that particular business. However, the fact that they own patents
wins them millions of dollars from the tech companies they sue.
The best example is of course the case of Research In
Motion, who has been sued by NTP for using technology that NTP owned. The
lawsuit lasted four long years, and RIM was forced to pay $612.5 million in a
settlement with NTP in order to avoid getting its BlackBerry e-mail service
shut down.
This isn’t the first attempt tech companies have made in
order to prevent patent infringement lawsuits. Moreover, tech companies have
also tried to convince the Senate to make changes to the patent-law in order to
avoid being sued by “patent trolls.”
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