Yahoo owns thousands of patents that are at the crossroads of the Internet. For decades Yahoo has dominated web marketing, search engine, social media, mobile and cloud technology. Yahoo was born at the inception of the 1990s dot-com book. Jerry Yang and David Filo founded Yahoo in 1994 while they were electrical engineering students at Stanford University.
As a software development company, Yahoo is constantly designing new products and disruptive technologies. It is a prolific patent owner, having filed 112 patents between January and June 2016 alone!
In April 2016, Yahoo sold a vast patent portfolio to its subsidiary company Excalibur IP. The 3,000 patents are the backbone of Internet technology. You can buy them yourself for about $3 billion or so.
A patent troll would have a great time with Yahoo’s patents. Think of all the companies which could be sued for allegedly having infringed these foundational patents.
Hopefully an operating company with sufficient working capital will purchase the patents. We may witness the deployment of Yahoo’s software to build new and disruptive technologies.
The Internet of Things lies beyond. Yahoo, into whatever it eventually morphs , has done ourplanet a real service. Its patent portfolio will survive the likely demise of the moribund company. Yahoo lost sight of the goal line and lost its way.
Move over, Kodak. It’s time for another great company to lose its patents as its death knell approaches.
(c) Copyright 2016. Paul Rubell. All rights are reserved.
Tech and Privacy Law 