Digital security firms Trend Micro and Symantec are fighting Intellectual Ventures’ patent claims with a unique legal argument — asserting that they shouldn’t be required to pay a total of $310 million to license a patent that originally cost IV a mere $750,000 to acquire outright.
Reuters has been digging through the court filing in the case and has details on the arguments by both sides. Depending on the outcome, the argument by Trend Micro and Symantec could have significant implications for the business-model of Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue-based patent holding company and technology development lab run by former Microsoft technology chief Nathan Myhrvold.
The news service quotes U.S. District Judge Leonard Stark asking at a hearing, “Who would possibly pay hundreds of millions of dollars for something that we know a willing seller would sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars?”
Intellectual Ventures argues in response that it knows more about the usage of the technology than the seller did. Under a common patent licensing model, companies that license a particular patents pay a royalty depending on how much they use the technology in their products.
A report earlier this month by one of the same Reuters reporters, Dan Levine, said Intellectual Ventures has pulled back on its patent acquisitions as it tries to raise another $3 billion — with some earlier investors, such as Google, declining to put money into the company this time.
We’ve asked an IV representative for comment, and we’ll update this post depending on what we hear back.
