Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:10:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120423/10261318610/facebook-buys-most-aol-patents-microsoft-that-it-bought-just-weeks-ago.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120423/10261318610/facebook-buys-most-aol-patents-microsoft-that-it-bought-just-weeks-ago.shtml bought all of AOL's patents for about a billion dollars. Last week, the news came out that Facebook had bid on the patents too, but lost. However, it's now worked out a deal to buy a bunch of those patents from Microsoft anyway for about $550 million. There's also some sort of cross-licensing as a part of this. The end result is that it's more like Microsoft and Facebook teamed up to pool resources to buy the patents from AOL. It's unclear who now has the Netscape patents, or what's going to be done with these patents. It's good that they didn't end up in the hands of pure trolls, but it still seems like a shame that these companies have to spend so much money on something of which the only value is in either keeping them from getting sued or in shaking down others for innovating. What happened to the days when companies could just compete with products in the marketplace?

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]]> patent-shuffling http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120423/10261318610 Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:17:14 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071228/110729.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071228/110729.shtml sue Microsoft for antitrust violations. Microsoft eventually paid $750 million to AOL to settle the charges, leading many to assume that AOL was then going to kill off Netscape. While Mozilla (which was effectively spun out of Netscape) continued to gain traction, it made little sense for AOL to keep offering a "Netscape" browser, even if built on Mozilla code. Yet, in 2004 we were surprised to hear that AOL was still releasing a new Netscape browser. Since then, we'd pretty much forgotten that AOL actually offered Netscape as a browser and had assumed that it had been killed off. While that may have been effectively true, the reality was that the company was still working on a Netscape browser... until now. AOL has officially announced that it will be ending support for the Netscape browser for the six or seven people who still use it. While it won't impact very many people, it certainly is an "end of an era" type moment. While there may be some post mortems to suggest that Microsoft "killed" Netscape, the reality is that bad strategic decisions at Netscape (wanting to charge for the browser, getting distracted with other projects, bloat, bloat, bloat) were more to blame for its real demise a decade ago.

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