Hey, you gotta have ammo in case there’s a war. Facebook is believed to have bought 750 patents off of IBM, according to a Bloomberg report. As patent wars rage among technology companies, Facebook has found itself with a pretty meager cache of weapons: 503 filed applications and as few as 56 actual patents. The new patents are said to cover a wide range of components of the Facebook business. This buy up has a lot to do with the newly filed patent infringement suit by Yahoo against Facebook.
Facebook, the world’s biggest social-networking service, is bolstering its legal defenses amid a standoff with rivals that have broader intellectual property portfolios. Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) sued Facebook this month, accusing it of infringing patents covering critical website functions. Facebook may have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars for the IBM patents, said Erin- Michael Gill, a managing director at MDB Capital Group LLC.
“This is a very big deal,” said Gill, who is chief intellectual property officer at MDB, an investment bank focused on intellectual property. While it’s not clear how strong the patents are, “Facebook is now where it’s supposed to be.”
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