Before Twitter went public in November of 2013, it received a demand letter from IBM alleging that Twitter infringed at least three U.S. patents owned by IBM, and invited Twitter to negotiate a business resolution of the infringement allegations. At the time, Twitter owned 9 issued patents and had filed about 95 U.S. and foreign patent applications, while IBM is the world’s leading patent holder owning more than 6800 at the end of 2013. In a deal announced last week, the companies announced that it had acquired over 900 patents from IBM and had entered into a cross-licensing agreement. This isn’t the first time that a company has purchased a large portion of IBM’s patent portfolio to shore up its own patent portfolio in an effort to defend itself against patent infringement suits. In March of 2012, before its own IPO, Facebook struck a deal to acquire 750 IBM patents to defend itself against allegations from Yahoo. Similarly, in 2010, Google purchased more than 1,000 IBM patents to shield itself against infringement lawsuits.

Remarkably, IBM has held the record of most patents held for 20 straight years, and even with selling off large portions of its portfolio, it doesn’t appear as though IBM is slowing down anytime soon.

Sources: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/03/twitter_ibm_patents/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/31/twitter-acquires-ibm-patents/

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