Are Nortel's 4G IPR Assets Really That Critical?

Posted Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:08:53 EDT by Stuart Carlaw

Much noise has been made recently about the rumor that Nortel’s 4G IPR assets will not be transferred to NSN as part of the current transaction. Light Reading, and its sister company Heavy Reading http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=178537 made a lot of this story on last Friday.

I would argue that they are making something of a mountain out of a molehill. To put this all into perspective, Nortel only owns 1.26% of OFDM patents, 3% of MIMO patents and 0.44% of Beamforming patents. In comparison, NSN has significantly more in each sector.

More importantly, when you boil this down, the Nortel assets really will only equate to less than 100 essential patents at the very top end. Especially when looking at precedent being set by other litigation processes such as that seen in the Nokia/Interdigital case where only 2 of 29 filed patents were found to be essential in a British court.

If NSN don’t have ownership of these patents is it such a big deal? NSN are smart enough to have clauses in the purchase contract for favorable access to the technologies covered by the patents.