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Facebook buys AOL patents from Microsoft for $550M | 133 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Facebook buys AOL patents from Microsoft for $550M
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 01:34 PM EDT

Article link.

I know the purchase price includes a licensing cost for additional patents, but it is sad that 650 patents are valued at $550 million.

That puts the average price $846,000 (rounded) each. If you include the licensing for the additional 275, that puts the average* at $600,000 (rounded) each.

* Considering you own the patent you have full control including initiating lawsuits. If you license a patent, you generally don't get the equivalent of full control.

Now... considering the average cost of defending against a patent starts at a cool $2 million, it seems to me that the purchase price of the patents is not valued on their actual technical value... but on their value as lawsuit risk aversion (or lawsuit threat) material.

That's the sad part: in today's market the value of a patent is not in it's actual technical value - but in the perceived litigation value.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Dropbox Adds Key Feature That Supposedly Made Megaupload Illegal: Link To Download
Authored by: artp on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 01:37 PM EDT

On Techdirt:

Popular cloud service provider Dropbox has announced the ability to share stuff in your Dropbox with a link. This is not a revolutionary offering. It's actually pretty common and can be quite useful for simple sharing of files. But, as Mathew Ingram noted, this is exactly part of the reason that Megaupload was accused of criminal conspiracy.

The Dropbox announcement:

Sharing with friends and family is easy! Once you’ve saved that video of your niece’s birthday party to Dropbox, just make a link to send to grandma and she can simply watch online — no download required! This saves you the hassle of having to re-upload or attach it to an email.

Now, I don't use Dropbox, or any other "cloud" service if I have absolutely ANY other choice (please don't look at my gmail account), but I DO use torrents a LOT. I download Linux distros and get Humble Indie Bundles, for the most part. But any time I see a torrent available, I use it, then leave the torrent up as long as I can. I'm no torrent superstar, but I've gotten UL/DL ratios of 40 before. So this is of great interest to me. Things may get very interesting here in the next few.

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley sinks ?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Microsoft Launches Skype for Windows Phone
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 01:41 PM EDT

From the Article:

1.0 release does not allow background calling
only allow users to Skype calls if they have Skype open and are using the app
You really didn't think MS was going to allow multi-tasking if they didn't have to... did ya?

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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