Apple, Microsoft, Sony Sell Smartphone Patents For $900M

I'm confused, didn't these guys pay $4.5 billion for all these patents two years ago?

"Today's announcement is good news for our industry as it demonstrates our patent system working to promote innovation," said Erich Andersen, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Microsoft. "We joined Rockstar to ensure that both Microsoft and our industry would have broad access to the Nortel patent portfolio, and we're pleased to have accomplished that goal through this sale and our valuable license to the patents being sold."

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Steve said:

I'm confused, didn't these guys pay $4.5 billion for all these patents two years ago?

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Well just googling some numbers, in the 3rd quarter Apple sold 39 million new iPhones, and that only counts about 2 weeks of iPhone 6 sales. Figure $400 per phone that's over $15 billion in revenue right there. And figure half that is the cost to make it... yeah I'd say they got their money's worth already.

actually on reading that link it looks like they selling non exclusive patents to anyone who wants them under frand rules which is what most of the tech industry agreed to before rambus basically tricked the ram industry into using the concepts they were the process of filling for patents... which side tracked a lot of tech designs. Patents in the us where there to stir innovation. So what rockstar is doing is basically licensing the tech while retaining the right to sell it to anyone else... for a reasonable price which people were taking about that target figure of 900 million a couple years ago before apple won the first case.