To date, patents have not been a big issue in UC. Generally the large vendors do not sue each other, as they all have patent portfolios and patent wars are akin to the old Cold War doctrine of MAD--Mutually Assured Destruction. If I sue you, you countersue and the only people who make any money are the lawyers.
But that may be about to change, as Rockstar is now in business. And Rockstar is the biggest, baddest patent troll in the world. A patent troll is a company that has a patent portfolio, but does not have any products, so it cannot be countersued.
Rockstar Bidco is the legal entity that was created by Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony to buy the vast Nortel patent portfolio in 2011. Based on these patents, Rockstar Bidco has filed its first set of lawsuits in the mobile market.
In the Nortel bankruptcy auction, Rockstar bid $4.5B to win out versus Google and buy a large set of core patents in the telecommunications space and a number of general technology patents. The patents were far-ranging, as Nortel had limited the distribution of patents in business sales to those that were only used in that business. So all the general and valuable cross-portfolio patents were held by Nortel to the end, and then ended up being sold to Rockstar. In fact, according to Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi , "Pretty much anyone out there is infringing,". At the time, many knowledgeable technology insiders saw Rockstar as the ultimate patent troll and many worried about what was to come.
Well, that time is here as Rockstar has filed patent lawsuits against Google and seven Android phone vendors: Asustek, HTC, Huawei, LG Electronics, Pantech, Samsung, and ZTE. The lawsuits focus on six patents titled "associative search engine". The patents describe "an advertisement machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network." The oldest patent in the case is US Patent No. 6,098,065, with a filing date of 1997. The most recent patent in the suit was filed in 2007 and granted in 2011.
A key question for the UC community is whether this suit and the general situation will impact VoIP and UC? While the impact of this suit may be to begin trying to get Google to pay royalties, how does Rockstar look when it comes to UC and the companies offering those services?
Obviously it is not clear whether Rockstar will move in UC, but some of the core VoIP patents that Nortel owned are now in Rockstar's possession. As Nortel was a leader in developing VoIP and associated technologies, there are a number of patents in that space that many of the current vendors could be infringing. As you may remember, the Microsoft/Nortel patent cross-license was a key component of the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) between those two companies. Microsoft saw this as a critical part of its business relationship with Nortel due to the strength of the patent portfolio.
The initial focus of Rockstar is on Android and the impact that Android is having on the five phone-vendor businesses represented by the owners of Rockstar. However, if Rockstar can use the Nortel patents on behalf of its owners with the impunity of a patent troll, the results could be significant, for the industry at large and potentially for the UC industry as well.
Avaya (as the company that acquired Nortel's Enterprise business) has licenses to many of these patents, and Microsoft is an owner of Rockstar and therefore will not be a party to any actions. But others in our industry may find themselves the target of either a licensing action or a lawsuit. Rockstar has 32 employees, many focused on finding infringing industries and companies. I don't think we will have to wait very long to find that UC is one of their focus areas.
