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Twitter Bolsters Its IP Portfolio – Acquires Over 900 IBM Patents

Before Twitter went public in November of 2013, it received a demand letter from IBM alleging that Twitter infringed at least three U.S. patents owned by IBM, and invited Twitter to negotiate a business resolution of the infringement allegations. At the time, Twitter owned 9 issued patents and had filed about 95 U.S. and foreign patent applications, while IBM is the world’s leading patent holder owning more than 6800 at the end of 2013. In a deal announced last week, the companies announced that it had acquired over 900 patents from IBM and had entered into a cross-licensing agreement. This isn’t the first time that a company has purchased a large portion of IBM’s patent portfolio to shore up its own patent portfolio in an effort to defend itself against patent infringement suits. In March of 2012, before its own IPO, Facebook struck a deal to acquire 750 IBM patents to defend itself against allegations from Yahoo. Similarly, in 2010, Google purchased more than 1,000 IBM patents to shield itself against infringement lawsuits.

Remarkably, IBM has held the record of most patents held for 20 straight years, and even with selling off large portions of its portfolio, it doesn’t appear as though IBM is slowing down anytime soon.

Sources: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/03/twitter_ibm_patents/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/31/twitter-acquires-ibm-patents/

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Klemchuk LLP is an Intellectual Property (IP), Technology, Internet, and Business law firm located in Dallas, TX.  The firm offers comprehensive legal services including litigation and enforcement of all forms of IP as well as registration and licensing of patents, trademarks, trade dress, and copyrights.  The firm also provides a wide range of technology, Internet, e-commerce, and business services including business planning, formation, and financing, mergers and acquisitions, business litigation, data privacy, and domain name dispute resolution.  Additional information about the IP law firm and its IP law attorneys may be found at www.klemchuk.com.

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