How Apple and Microsoft Armed 4,000 Patent Warheads

The patent business is hot, hot, hot.  Look at the settlement Apple received over Samsung.  So how do companies know when their patents are being infringed upon?  Contact the Rockstar Consortium.

The 32-person outfit has a single-minded mission: It examines successful products, like routers and smartphones, and it tries to find proof that these products infringe on a portfolio of over 4,000 technology patents once owned by one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies.

Wired takes a look at this niche industry in this piece here.

• When a Rockstar engineer uncovers evidence of infringement, the company documents it, contacts the manufacturer, and demands licensing fees for the patents in question. The demand is backed by the implicit threat of a patent lawsuit in federal court. Eight of the company’s staff are lawyers. In the last two months, Rockstar has started negotiations with as many as 100 potential licensees. And with control of a patent portfolio covering core wireless communications technologies such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 3G, there is literally no end in sight.
• Rockstar is a special kind of company. Because it doesn’t actually make anything, it can’t be countersued in patent cases. That wouldn’t be the case with Apple or Microsoft if they had kept the patents for themselves. And because it’s independent, it can antagonize its owners’ partners and customers in ways that its owner companies could not. “The principals have plausible deniability,” says Thomas Ewing, an attorney and intellectual property consultant. “They can say with a straight face: ‘They’re an independent company. We don’t control them.’ And there’s some truth to that.”

Inside the reverse-engineering lab at Rockstar.  Photo: Rockstar