For those unfamiliar with the Rockstar Consortium, they are a group of big tech companies consisting of Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Sony, and Ericsson, who have teamed up together to purchase patents from Nortel Networks which occurred back in 2011. Unfortunately it seems that the patents that they purchased were harder to license out than they thought which is why according to a report from Bloomberg, the consortium is allegedly looking to sell of a portion of the $4.5 billion worth of patents it had acquired a couple of years ago.
However on the flip side of things, Rockstar has managed to find use for several of its patents and have recently filed a lawsuit against the likes of Google and several of Google’s Android OEMs, claiming that they have infringed upon multiple patents. Naturally Google and the rest of the companies involved weren’t going to take this lying down, which is why we have recently reported that Google had filed a declaratory judgment against the Rockstar Consortium, accusing them of harassing them and for placing “a cloud” on Google’s Android platform. Are the folks at Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Sony, and Ericsson regretting their purchase of some of Nortel’s patents?