Legal wrangling in the technology world is making increasingly less sense. In March, Canadian company Mitel struck Facebook with a patent lawsuit. Now, The Next Web is reporting that Facebook is countersuing Mitel over two patents it believes are also being infringed.
So far, so normal. But there’s a weird twist. From The Next Web:
Interestingly, both those patents were acquired by Facebook for $US550 million in April 2012, about a month after Mitel filed the initial lawsuit. The seller was Microsoft, but the Redmond software giant had just acquired the patents from AOL in a transaction valued at $US1 billion for the entire portfolio.
So basically Facebook got sued by Mitel, bid for AOL’s patents, lost the auction to Microsoft, ended up buying a portion of AOL patents from Microsoft, and is now countersuing Mitel alleging the infringement of two of them.
All of which is kind of amusing but ultimately incredibly childish. Also: shouldn’t there be some kind of rule against doing that kind of thing anyway? Either way, please, please, please make these kinds of lawsuits stop. Thanks. [The Next Web]
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