Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures have acquired a sizable patent portfolio from IPWireless. The list of pending and granted patents, totaling approximately 500, consists of wireless communications technologies including essential concepts in 3G, 4G, LTE, and LTE-Advanced. The two companies split ownership of the patents, with Nvidia licensing the rights to those patents that it did not acquire.
The acquisition closed on April 30, and the patent ownership will be split between Intellectual Ventures and Nvidia. Each company automatically receives licenses for patents the other party received, while IPWireless continues to retain royalty-free access to the sold patents.
Intellectual Ventures, formed by ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, has a history of legal action against companies infringing on its patent portfolio. In February it sued AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, accusing the companies of failing to establish a licensing agreement before using a patented technique to exchange multimedia messages. The diverse portfolio has allowed the firm to constantly earn through license fee extraction rather than production, leading some critics to label it as a patent troll.
Terms of the acquisition, which closed on April 30, were not disclosed.
