Summary: The patent/litigation arms race keeps getting a little more complicated, as the 'arms' are being passed around to new and old entities that do nothing but shake-downs
LAST month we wrote about RPX, which might soon be bought by trolls, paying extraordinary amounts of money to patent trolls, such as Acacia (Microsoft-connected troll).
"It bought a lot of patents from Intellectual Ventures, which is more or less a Microsoft proxy."As it turns out, based on this blog post from yesterday, RPX also buys USPTO patents from Microsoft patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures. To quote:
RPX has acquired a tranche of patent assets from the Intellectual Ventures Invention Science Fund in what is the first such deal between the firms. So far two sets of rights have shown up on the USPTO assignment database — one for 35 granted patents and applications and another for 22 — and a spokesperson for RPX confirmed that 66 assets had changed hands in total.
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RPX has done plenty of deals with NPEs such as Acacia and WiLAN in the past, but hasn’t bought any assets from IV. The pair did work together on the $525 million acquisition of the Kodak portfolio in 2012 which saw IV and a group of 12 licensees including Apple, Google and Samsung stump up much of the cash for the deal. Most of those patents are now held by Dominion Harbor and as more former IV assets end up in the courts we may see more acquisitions by RPX as it looks to mitigate patent risk for its clients.