"I think the patents combined with the IPR wins ARE ENOUGH to warrant a licensing deal or buyout, but I don't see a licensing deal happening because the alleged infringers are "innocent until proven guilty" and will continue to fight in court until a judge rules against
them. Why buy something you don't need unless a judge says you need it because you broke patent law?
[ I think your "innocent until proven guilty" theory is flawed in a big way... Your question of "why buy something you don't need unless a judge says you need it ?.....poses a logical question, but the answer, to me, is the T-Rex in the room. I have been saying it for long, but no one will recognize it or provide the answer to it, as I pose it... It is, once again, as follows. I ask you... what is the estimated value of the patent suite to a buyer? I realize its not an easy question to answer w/any accuracy, but that doesn't matter because there are enough "knowns" to be able to make an estimate that while cannot be too accurate, still is estimateable enough to make my point and answer the your question of "why buy?". I keep pointing out and sketching the various money making abilities to a buyer. They all need to be considered. There's of course the infringement collections from countless companies, for the next 9+ years and which gets shorter everyday. There's massive amounts of potential licensing available. There's the value of putting a stop, forever, to the threat of being sued (an eventually inevitability) by whoever does own the patents. There's the stoppage of the fact that when you get sued, you will also lost the ability to keep earning money from selling whatever service you have that uses whatever patents. There is the increase in revenues from stopping your competition from using the patents to sell services like yours. There likely some other monetary benefits but for now, these are enough to work with. Certain statistics & parameters have already been put together by vplm in order to come up with sale price & damages asking values. Using those metrics and applying them to the above list and then multiplying by how many companies likely be able to sue or sell license to or reach a settlement with, in the alloted time, will allow a very rough estimate. But a very rough estimate is all that is needed to make my point, if ppl would just do it.
The way I see it, even the most conservative estimate one could come up with using the above noted things to measure, would come up with a sum, so ridiculously large, and yet still very realistically based, that it would be more than any other case I have ever heard of. It would be a complete game changer. The closest figure I can come up with is in the realm of a trillion dollars. When you start applying the realistic usage and rate of usage of the patents, which we have only begin to delve into, you see this is not a ridiculous figure at all.
Ok, so now I have to wonder if you agree or disagree w/that. There are no doubt at least hundreds of billions of dollars to be realized by any owner of the patents who goes after the rest of the infringers rather than sellout.
Another possibility, of course, is that a buyer, if a voip service provider, might fold the technology into their voip services business and in doing so, it would seem inevitable and almost inescapable, that it would propel them so far to the top of the service provider heap, that the rest would wind up swinging from their shoelaces. Thst too, represents a huge, inestimateable amount of revenue (unless they turned out to be really bad managers).
Of course all this depends on one little detail. That the patents are "all that" which they have been touted to be.
So if youre still with me and in agreement so far.....
The next question is how much will you lose if you don't buy? That's fairly easy.. It would be the loss of all the above revenue streams plus whatever infringement fines you wind up with.
Next thing that must be answers is how much is the cost of buying the patents? All we know is the last price Malak named was $2 billion but that was quite some time ago and we know for a fact that price has gone up because it goes w/o saying that if the damage estimates are about to go way up, the sale price would follow. The damages were said to be going up by a rate of approximately 5x. The sale price likely something similar, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm guessing the old prices are still in effect, more or less.
So this leads to the question of weighing the balance of the difference between the cost of buying vs not buying. I'm guessing the cost of buying right now, is somewhere in the neighborhood between $2 & 5 billion. After 5 yrs of trying, it's hard for me to see that Malak wouldn't accept something in that range.
And the bare bare minimum of return upon buying is at least tens of billions, but more like hundreds of billions and beyond.
So there you have it. The entire above scenario says...that if you have the money to buy the patents and IF YOU BELIEVE the patents are ALL THAT, there is your answer to "why buy until you have to?" Pretty compelling reasons in my opinion.
But don't forget something else...
All that refers to the here and now...... and it's as compelling as can be......but what about before the IPR sweep, and what about a year ago or 2 or 3 yrs ago? How much cheaper could the patents have been purchased for then? Alot cheaper, no doubt. And STILL no one bit. And no one even took out a license. And no tried to settle. So not then and not now, even 7+ months AFTER the sweep. And it's pretty well accepted that there soon will be a vplm positive ptab decision followed by stay lift, followed by all the new and largely increased damages and sale prices.
To me, this leads to one conclusion only...
And that is that all these voip companies, plus any other type of potential buyer, cannot and do not believe the patents are "all that". I have given a great deal of thought to this and there are so many affected voip service providers. Far more than the named 60. And there is just no way they could....... A L L ........think the same way about choosing to not buy... IF.... they believed in the patents being all that. They have been aware of the patents, I'm positive, for at least the 5 yrs but likely more.. They have had more than ample time to do all the necessary DD on the patents and it was definitely incumbent upon them to have done so, unless they were idiots.
So the bottom line, to toe this whole scenario together...
Is that if their DD led them to conclude the patents are all that, then choosing to not buy (or license), in view of the above revenues estimates laid out, it would've been a no brainer to buy or license. It's that simple. Simple gargantuan economics.
On the other hand, if they determined the patents were not all that..........thst would easily and totally answer the "why buy" question.
. I think it is really just that simple. You just do t leave a huge pile of gold lying in the middle of the road for your neighbor to come along and snatch it up.
............................
"We don't put people in jail unless they are proven guilty in a court of law, or admit guilt. Same
concept applies here, IMO.
..............
Sorry, but that's not true. We do indeed pit people on jail, sometimes for quite awhile, before trial if they can't make bail or have no bail. In some cases, for years w/o being found guilty. And in the case of Quantanamo, which I realize is a different story to some degree, indefinitely in jail for a long time w/o any trial. So it's just not true.
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