Facebook buys part of AOL patents for $ 550 million from Microsoft

A couple of weeks ago, news about buying Instagram on Facebook and buying AOL patents by Microsoft appeared almost simultaneously. The cost of shopping is almost the same - a little over a billion dollars. Immediately after that, many representatives of Habr began to speak out in the spirit that Facebook would be better to purchase a package of patents, and not Instagram. It seems that the management of a social network adhered to a similar opinion, only they planned to buy both patents and Instagram. And in fact bought.

Microsoft and Facebook have signed an agreement whereby some of the patents previously purchased from AOL will be resold to Facebook. This is a package of 650 patents, plus the right to use certain patents that remain with Microsoft. The amount of the transaction is 550 million dollars.

In general, such a deal is beneficial for both parties. Microsoft doesn’t need the entire package, according to some experts, this company needed only about a hundred patents. But I had to buy the entire package, because AOL refused to sell patents “at retail”. So 100 necessary patents were bought, and about 800 more unnecessary.
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Now the owner of most of the package is Facebook, which about a month ago acquired another patent package from IBM, which includes 750 different kinds of patents. It may well be that the company is thus going to build reliable protection from competitors. Now Facebook is suing Yahoo, as the latter accuses the social network of violating some Yahoo patents. How the trial will end is not very clear.

Via arstechnica