Facebook is set to pay Microsoft USD 550 million for 650 patents recently auctioned by AOL in its effort to boost its IP for the looming litigation against Yahoo.
Under pressure from its stockholders to make changes to prevent further revenue fall, AOL was obliged to sell and license over 800 patents to Microsoft on April 9. It would retain over 300 applications and patents after the auction.
Aside from the 800 patents bought by Microsoft, AOL will also give them license to 300 patents it has retained for a tag of USD 1.056 billion. Thus, Microsoft ultimately acquired 925 AOL patent applications and patents, 650 of which will go to Facebook. The 2 firms has also agreed to license their patent holdings to each other.
It is not yet clear what technologies Facebook has acquired rights to or those that has remained with Microsoft. But considering that the legal battle with Yahoo concerns messaging, social networking, etc, it looks like Facebook would want to have ammunition of its own.
According to a statement from Springhill Group Home, the deal with Facebook has allowed Microsoft to at least recoup more than half of its costs while accomplishing its goals from the auction of AOL. However, it cannot be readily said that Microsoft has really profited from the agreement as patent valuing is a complicated process.
Microsoft has a relatively long history of close relationship with the social network giant. In 2007, it has invested USD 240 million in Facebook, giving it a 1.6% stake. Since then, the 2 firms have had collaborations like Microsoft’s Bing search and search ad technologies being used on Facebook. Its video chat technology also comes from Microsoft as it has acquire
tony bricks on 17 May 12A US government-funded study says North Koreans have unprecedented access to foreign media, giving them a more positive impression of the outside world. But it says North Korea still has the world's most closed media environment, and those changing perceptions are unlikely to translate into significant pressure on their repressive government in the short term. The study was commissioned by the State Department and conducted by a consulting group, InterMedia. It is based on research involving several hundred North Korean defectors and refugees during 2010-2011. The Associated Press obtained the study ahead of its formal release Thursday. The study, titled "A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment," says restrictions that threaten years in prison and hard labor for activities like watching a South Korean soap opera or listening to foreign news broadcasts have been tightened since the mid-2000s, but are enforced less than in the past. People remain wary of government inspection teams, but fewer citizens appear to be reporting on each other. Nearly half of those interviewed said that while in North Korea they had watched a foreign DVD, the most commonly used type of outside media. About a quarter of people had listened to a foreign radio news broadcast or watched a foreign news station. Nearly one-third of television watchers whose sets were fixed to state-run programming had modified them in order to capture a signal from outside stations detectable along the Chinese and South Korean borders. The authors caution that the interviews and surveys on which their research is based are not statistically representative of North Korea's population. A disproportionate number lived in proximity to the Chinese border before they fled. North Korea is separated from the more prosperous South Korea by a heavily militarized frontier, and access to the country is strictly controlled. But the communist government's monopoly on information began to erode in
