A patent troll funded by Apple, Microsoft, and a handful of other
tech companies is suing Google and a number of its Android partners,
including Samsung, HTC, Asustek, and LG.
The lawsuits were filed on Thursday by a tiny company called the Rockstar Consortium, as first reported by Reuters. Rockstar is a new breed of company. It’s jointly owned by five tech giants — Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Sony, and Ericsson — and it’s chartered with making back the $4.5 billion these companies pooled together to build its patent portfolio.
Rockstar was born in 2011, when Google and Intel lost a high-profile bidding war for the remains of Canadian telecom giant Nortel’s patent portfolio.
The consortium couldn’t be reached for comment, but when WIRED profiled Rockstar last year, its CEO John Veschi told us that “pretty much” all technology companies infringed his massive portfolio of over 4,000 patents. “It would be hard for me to envision that there are high-tech companies out there that don’t use some of the patents in our portfolio,” he said.
Rockstar employs a handful of former Nortel engineers who spend their days in Ottawa reverse-engineering labs scouring the tech world for infringing products.
In the lawsuits filed Thursday, Rockstar sued Google, Asustek, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung and ZTE. Court documents show that the company has created two subsidiaries — Mobilestar and Netstar — presumably in order to focus its patent licensing ventures in different areas. That would be one subsidiary for mobile and one for internet technologies.
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| Rockstar CEO John Veschi. Photo: Dan Krauss/Wired |
The lawsuits were filed on Thursday by a tiny company called the Rockstar Consortium, as first reported by Reuters. Rockstar is a new breed of company. It’s jointly owned by five tech giants — Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Sony, and Ericsson — and it’s chartered with making back the $4.5 billion these companies pooled together to build its patent portfolio.
Rockstar was born in 2011, when Google and Intel lost a high-profile bidding war for the remains of Canadian telecom giant Nortel’s patent portfolio.
The consortium couldn’t be reached for comment, but when WIRED profiled Rockstar last year, its CEO John Veschi told us that “pretty much” all technology companies infringed his massive portfolio of over 4,000 patents. “It would be hard for me to envision that there are high-tech companies out there that don’t use some of the patents in our portfolio,” he said.
Rockstar employs a handful of former Nortel engineers who spend their days in Ottawa reverse-engineering labs scouring the tech world for infringing products.
In the lawsuits filed Thursday, Rockstar sued Google, Asustek, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung and ZTE. Court documents show that the company has created two subsidiaries — Mobilestar and Netstar — presumably in order to focus its patent licensing ventures in different areas. That would be one subsidiary for mobile and one for internet technologies.
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