In early April, AOL said it had sold 800 of its 1,100 patents to Microsoft for $ 1.056 billion $ U.S. Some sources in the English press also emphasized that Facebook wanted to purchase these same patents before Microsoft did.
This is by deploying $1 billion that Microsoft has finally won the day, surpassing it seems the offer of the popular social network for obtaining these said patents. During this transaction, Microsoft has also obtained a nonexclusive license to another 300 patents AOL. The Redmond giant could sell some non-essential patents in its arsenal, which suggests that Facebook may be able to recover some.
The day of the transaction, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the purchase of Instagram for a similar amount of money. As the young CEO negotiated by himself purchasing the application for sharing photos, his right hand spokesperson Sheryl Sandberg was in charge of negotiations with AOL.
Last March, Facebook 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.
