Jew World Order

Microsoft has dropped an eye-popping US$1 billion on 800 AOL patents, an astonishing amount likely spent to keep the intellectual property trove away from rival Google.

However, according to a source close to the situation, Google didn’t even bid on the portfolio.

That makes Microsoft’s lavish bid, which averages US$1.25 million per patent, all the more astounding. Still, even without Google, there was good reason: according to data crunched by MDB Capital Group, an investment banking firm that focuses on intellectual property, the AOL patents have far more relevance to Microsoft than to any other company.

MDB found that in Microsoft’s own patent filings, it cites AOL patents as related intellectual property more often than any other company — even more often than AOL has cited its own patents. Microsoft cited AOL patents 1331 times, compared to AOL citing its own patents 1267 times.

The list of companies that cites AOL patents drops precipitously from there. IBM is next, with 570 citations, followed by ATT, with 419 citations and Yahoo, with 362 citations. Google is farther down the list, at 304 citations.

While it’s possible that other companies might have bid against Microsoft, the data from MDB suggests that Microsoft was willing to pay as much as it did because the AOL patents had more strategic importance to it. So Microsoft both wanted the patents, and it wanted to make sure that rivals didn’t get them.

“Microsoft probably believed that Google would have been interested,” said Erin-Michael Gill, MDB’s managing director and chief intellectual property officer.

Moreover, the average age of the patents in the AOL portfolio, which also includes some patents that AOL did not sell to Microsoft, is about four years old. This suggests that many of the patents have yet to be licensed to other companies, something that makes the intellectual property more valuable.

“The amount Microsoft paid implies that there are very few encumbrances on the portfolio,” Gill said.

That increases the value of the portfolio, giving Microsoft more opportunities to license the patents in order to recoup its investment — and Microsoft has an active, aggressive licensing program. Of course, it also gives Microsoft another weapon in its patent battles over Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems. The company has already struck deals with several device makers — including HTC and LG — to license its technology to continue to use Android and Chrome, and avoid litigation. And it has sued companies that haven’t agreed to licensing terms, including Barnes Noble and Motorola.

The new AOL deal should give Microsoft more munitions for their intellectual property battles with Google.

“There is a whole host of products that Microsoft will want to increase their leverage over Google with,” Gill said. “This should allow Microsoft to operate as something of a gatekeeper.”

Neither Microsoft nor AOL disclosed the specific patents involved in the deal. Last month, though, patent-research firm Envision IP reviewed more than 700 patents assigned to AOL, and found, not surprisingly, that a large chunk relate to instant messaging and email technology. Other patents relate to browsers, search engines and multimedia technology.

AOL picked up several patents acquired in its Netscape. While it’s uncertain whether Microsoft acquired any of them, as All Things Digital‘s Peter Kafka reported on Monday, there are several that would likely be of interest. Among them:

• Patent No. 6854085, which covers technology to fill out forms on web pages automatically
• Patent No. 5657390, for the technology called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), now called Transport Layer Security (TLS), which sets up an encrypted communication channel between browsers and the web servers they connect to. At the time Netscape got the SSL patent, it said, “It’s not an income source that’s necessary to exploit”
• Patent No. 7478142, a technique for packaging applications that are delivered over a network and run inside a web browser
• Patent No. 5774670, which governs how web servers and browsers can cooperate to preserve “state” information — essentially, the condition that a computing device is in at a particular moment. The technology can be used, for example, to put several items in an e-commerce shopping cart. “When the customer wants to purchase the products in the virtual shopping basket, the browser sends the corresponding state information to a specified check-out web page for processing,” the patent said
• Closely related is the broader Patent No. 5826242, which concerns the use of ability of a web browser to communicate about state with a web server using HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol on which the web is built
• Patent No. 6069633, governing various ways to improve a “sprite engine” — display technology that handles drawing moving or changing graphic elements such as video game characters
• Patent No. 6076104, which explains a technique to make certain parts of a video connect to a web address when clicked. It’s analogous to image maps, widely used to use a part of an image to link to a Web address. The inventor is former Netscape executive Mike McCue, currently founder and chief executive of Flipboard
• Patent No. 7525951 and Patent No. 6839737, which govern integration of instant-messaging software with email software, so that people can see when their contacts are available for online chat (separately, AOL was awarded a patent for instant messaging)
• Patent No. 7685431, which covers a technique to show how hard it is to crack a proposed password a person types it into a field
• Patent No. 6175853, which governs technology that lets collaborating people share to a resource that can only be accessed when technologically unlocked. The patent’s technique governs decentralised access-control methods that a group can use rather than relying on a central locking mechanism that determines whether the resource is available
• Patent No. 6181322 describes technology to let people click a mouse with their palms rather than their fingers, to avoid repetitive stress injury.

Via CNET