Going, going, gone. Nortel's patents sell at auction for $4.5 billion
Nortel’s portfolio of intellectual property patents sold on Friday for a whopping $4.5 billion, in what’s being touted as the biggest patent auction in history.
The winners include tech heavy hitters like Apple, Research in Motion (RIM), Ericsson, Microsoft, EMC Corporation and Sony, who banded together to bid (under the name Rockstar) on the 6,000 U.S. and foreign patents offered up by soon-to-be bankrupt telecommunications giant Nortel Networks.
RIM contributed $770 million to the bidding and Ericsson is reportedly paying out a $340 million for its portion.
The patents cover a wide range of technologies from wireless, voice, 4G, data networking and optical with broad reaches to Internet search and social networking.
Missing from the winner’s circle is, most obviously, search engine king Google, who in April, put in what is known as the “stalking-horse bid” of $900 million for the portfolio.
According to Google’s attorneys, seeking out the patents was a way to prevent a number of lawsuits.
And after Friday’s outcome the response from Google continued to express concern for impending patent litigation that could result.
“This outcome is disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition,” Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kent Walker was reported in Bloomberg as having written in an email. “We will keep working to reduce the current flood of patent litigation that hurts both innovators and consumers.”
Google could be particularly affected by litigation relating to various suits associated with Google’s Android platform and endure increased licensing costs.
With so much on the line, what's even more surprising is news that during the bidding Google was bidding numbers that weren’t even numbers in the final days of the auction.
According to an article by Reuters, Google threw out numbers representing mathematical constants like Brun’s constant and Meissel-Mertens constant ($1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128, respectively). The story quoted an anonymous source, who said when the bidding got to $3 billion, Google bid pi, or $3.14159 billion.
Whether Google was fed up with the auction or joking, isn’t clear.
What is clear is the effect this auction has on the perceived value of intellectual property moving foreward.
Intellectual Ventures Vice President for Acquisitions, Feisal Mosleh told The International Business Times that Intellectual property is a major financial asset for corporations, one that is growing at around 25 percent each year.
"Since the market took off in the last eight years or so, intellectual property went from being an unused asset in the corner to a prime financial asset that can be traded," The International Business News quoted Mosleh as saying. "There is no shortage of capital for the right invention. It's one of the most differentiating aspects of business today."
The unprecedented price for the patent portfolio is seen as a necessary cost because the patents can be used not only create new cutting edge technologies, but because they can help defend patent infringement which can include long, costly lawsuits.
We don’t know at this point, if the sale of the patents will mean an even greater number of new lawsuits, or will work to soften past attacks.
The dividing up of the patents won’t take place for at least a year, when Nortel’s enters into bankruptcy.
What we do know is the bar has been forever raised on the assumed value of intellectual property.