You’ve got to love the ups and downs of the tech industry, some days they are willing to play nice in the sandbox and other days they will fight you to the death. Over the last year there has been a number of battles over ownership of patents. Google picked up Motorola last year for $12.5 billion, of course many are still wondering exactly what will come of this, but they did acquire a number of patents in the process.
Last month, Yahoo in its struggle to figure what the heck they are turned to their lawyers and sued Facebook. There are 10 patents named in the law suit, Facebook returned with its own law suit. This drama continues to play out right before our eyes and will probably be solved in a board room with both parties agreeing to some middle ground.
This morning AOL cashed in in a big way on their patents by selling 300 of them to Microsoft for $1 billion, and the market reacted extremely positively by rewarding AOL with a 35% bump in their stock price this morning.
Can’t beat them, buy them? Can’t beat them – sue them? Can’t beat them – sell what you don’t need.
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