Acacia Research’s suit against Huawei and ZTE alleging...
Acacia Research’s suit against Huawei and ZTE alleging infringement of Access Co.’s PalmSource patents is scheduled for trial in mid-2014 in U.S. District Court, Marshall, Texas, said Acacia President Matthew Vella at the Cowen and Co. investor conference Wednesday in…
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New York. Acacia reached agreement with Access in 2010 to license PalmSource patents to cellphone suppliers and has since generated “in the nine digits” of gross revenue through settlements and licensing pacts, he said. Among the five patents at the heart of the Huawei-ZTE suit was one granted Palm in 2002 covering a method for displaying and manipulating multiple calendars on a personal digital assistant (PDA). Palm’s PalmPilot was among the first PDAs when it was introduced in the mid-1990s. A second patent issued in 2010 described a method for making a phone call from an electronic device with an address list. Acacia, which gets about 40 percent of a given settlement, has licensed PalmSource IP to Apple, Google, HTC, Samsung and others, Vella said. Access, best known for its NetFront Internet browser, paid $325 million in 2005 for PalmSource, which was spun off from Palm two years earlier. At the time, analysts questioned the value of PalmSource’s IP. Acacia is taking a similar approaching to licensing 4G LTE technology it acquired in buying Adaptix last year for $160 million. It has licensing pacts with Microsoft and Samsung so far, Vella said. Among Adaptix’s more than 130 issued patents are those covering broadband orthogonal frequency division multiple access technology dealing with channel allocation as well as multiple-input and multiple-output IP. Acacia bought Adaptix from Baker Capital. Acacia has 257 patents under license and typically approaches negotiations for 5-7 portfolios containing 10-20 patents each, Vella said. Acacia expects to typically generate a return on its investment in the patents within 18 months, he said.