IN A LAWSUIT which was mentioned here several times last week, Prism won a lot of money despite making no products at all. As Joe Mullin put it the other day:
A patent-licensing entity that sued the five largest cell phone carriers has seen its biggest victory slip away.
Prism won a $30 million verdict against Sprint in 2015, when a jury found that Sprint violated US Patents No. 8,127,345 and 8,387,155, both of which describe methods of "managing access to protected computer resources." According to the complaint (PDF), filed in 2012, Sprint's Simply Everything Plan and Everything Data Plan were both methods of "controlling access to Sprint’s protected network resources" and thus infringed the patents.
"What they basically do is harvest/buy lots of patents, then use them to blackmail as many companies as possible for as much money as possible."As it turns out, MOSAID/Conversant's chief has just moved to the parasite known as "IPVALUE". When Richard Lloyd says that its "business" is patent "monetisation" he means patent trolling and adds this background: "Vector Capital acquired IPVALUE in 2014 as its investment vehicle in the IP space. Last year it acquired Longitude Licensing, the monetisation platform formed in 2013 with a portfolio of semiconductor patents previously owned by Elpida, and entered into a partnership with Cypress Semiconductor. The company looks to both acquire its own assets to monetise as well as advising other, large patent owners on their monetisation strategies."
What they basically do is harvest/buy lots of patents, then use them to blackmail as many companies as possible for as much money as possible. It's sometimes known as PAEs, a breed of patent trolls which the FTC has grown weary of. ⬆