At the begining of April, AOL said it had sold 800 of the company’s 1,100 patents to Microsoft for $1.056 billion. A few sources in the English press also stressed that Facebook wished to obtain these same patents before Microsoft did.
This is by implementing $1 billion that Microsoft has ultimately won the battle, surpassing it appears the proposal from the popular online community for buying these stated patents. While doing this transaction, Microsoft additionally obtained a non exclusive license to an additional 300 patents AOL. The Redmond monster could sell off some non-vital patents in its collection, which suggests that Facebook may be able to regain some.
The morning of the deal, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the purchasing of Instagram for a similar sum of money. When the young CEO negotiated by himself purchasing the software for swapping pictures, his right-hand representative Sheryl Sandberg was in charge of discussions with AOL.
Last March, Facebook social network purchased 750 patents from International Business Machines to counter the offensive in court by Yahoo at their expense. “Big Blue” has over 70,000 patents, after the 6180 added to its arsenal in 2011.
In the battle that competes for tech giants to get their hands on some patents to try to dissuade trial and accusations of copyright infringement, Google also obtained patents from International Business Machines in August 2011, and 1203 additional patents in September 2011 at a price and terms hich were not disclosed.