Patent Troll Now Armed With Thousands of Nortel Patents 220
dgharmon writes in with a story about the final outcome of thousands of Nortel patents that were bought last July. "You may recall last summer that Apple, Microsoft, EMC, RIM, Ericsson and Sony all teamed up to buy Nortel's patents for $4.5 billion. They beat out a team of Google and Intel who bid a bit less. While there was some antitrust scrutiny over the deal, it was dropped and the purchase went through. Apparently, the new owners picked off a bunch of patents to transfer to themselves... and then all (minus EMC, who, one hopes, was horrified by the plans) decided to support a massive new patent troll armed with the remaining 4,000 patents. The company is called Rockstar Consortium, and it's run by the folks who used to run Nortel's patent licensing program anyway — but now employs people whose job it is to just find other companies to threaten." On a semi-related note, there is a new petition to the White House to make a law that patent lawsuits that find for the defendant automatically fine the plaintiff three times the damages they were seeking."
Meanwhile, in California... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Meanwhile, in California... (Score:5, Funny)
Try prostitution, it's about just as honorable.
Re:Meanwhile, in California... (Score:5, Funny)
But being a lawyer makes more money and you get to decide who you screw.
Re:A Very New Petition (Score:5, Funny)
Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?
As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.
So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.
Stop shooting them down with little things like facts.
Re:A Very New Petition (Score:4, Funny)
"He who shall not be named"?
I'm assuming you're talking about Obama?
No, he is "He who should not be middle-named".