[excitom]

I think what he is referring to is when two mega corps would get into an IP dispute, the lawyers would bring the patent portfolios to the table. It would not be feasible to actually read through them all, so the agreement would be "surely in my large stack you are violating something and surely in your large stack we are violating something." So then you would weigh or measure the height of the stack, and the owner of the smaller would pay some royalties to the owner of the larger.

This is an exaggeration of course, but perhaps not far off the mark.

[AlbertCory]

> "This is an exaggeration" Ya think? Maybe when a big company is threatening a rube. If two big companies are making a deal, you can be damn sure that they use all available software to analyze each other's portfolios, and then read, manually, the ones that seem important. And get their legal counsels for the relevant divisions to read them, too, although they probably already know them.

Cross-licensing deals are immensely complicated. You have to think about indemnifying the partners, in particular. I actually sat in the Apple v. Samsung trial for one day, because Google was indemnifying Samsung, as they frequently do for Android partners.

A big problem with Motorola was: they actually make the hardware, so Google was being sued directly. The patent infringement suits are usually against the company that makes the device.