Intel has filed a
lawsuit against SoftBank-controlled Fortress Investment Group, alleging the
company stockpiled patents to hold up Intel as well as many other technology
companies with numerous suits.
In response to a
series of Patent Infringement cases that
Fortress has filed against Intel in recent years, this latest suit accuses
Fortress of engaging in anticompetitive behavior alleging that the company used
its stockpile of technology patents to patent troll Intel. As a result, Intel
is requesting the court to declare the patent aggregation business practice of
Fortress as unlawful and essentially unwind its operations.
In the past few
years, Intellectual Property (IP) aggregation
intended to enforce patents and get royalties has emerged into a business. It
has also lead to an increase in the number of companies known as patent
assertion entities (PAEs) or patent trolls that acquire a lot of patents from
several firms and then license them often in package deals to high-tech
organizations who are developing real products.
Fortress controls
several PAEs, and through a network of these entities, it has owned more than
1,000 U.S. technology patents, including patents granted originally to NXP
Semiconductor, providing Fortress with a fairly deep collection of chip Design
Patents. Aimed to make profits from those patents, Fortress
and PAEs that it controls have previously alleged that virtually all of Intel’s
CPUs produced since 2011 illegally use the NXP IP.
Certainly, Intel’s
recent lawsuit rests on the notion that PAE’s patent enforcement actions do not
necessarily lead to drive innovation by inventors; instead, they hurt
manufacturers. Intel insinuates that Fortress’s business model revolves around
the concept of parlaying patents, especially looking to profit from the range
between what the firm pays for the patent and what it thinks to get from
companies for settling the matter out of courts as defending in courts often
demands to spend even more.
Intel, on its part,
isn’t new at protesting against patent trolls. Nonetheless, what makes this
case complex is that Fortress, which has been bought by SoftBank for $3.3
billion in 2017, has the support of the Japanese multinational conglomerate. So
Fortress is far more affluent than any typical PAE. Moreover, SoftBank itself
is a competitor to Intel, as it also owns Arm.
Although agreeing that
this case is a bit complicated, still Intel doesn’t appear willing to pay to
Fortress for its patents, at least not without testing them legally in court
first. However, SoftBank hasn’t yet provided any official statement about
Intel’s antitrust lawsuit. ✅ For view source: https://bit.ly/36HHu6X
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