Bradley Arant Boult Cummings Partner David Mixon Quoted in Bloomberg News on Impending Bidding Wars for Nortel’s Patent Portfolio

David Mixon, Patent Attorney in the Huntsville office, was quoted in Bloomberg News and The Next Web in reference to the highly coveted patent portfolio of Nortel Networks Corp. This portfolio includes about 6,000 wireless technology patents and is considered crucial to gaining superiority in the mobile technology field. Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) is considering a bid that would outdo Google’s initial $900 million offer. “Handset makers may be motivated to pool their resources on a bid to protect themselves should Google try to use the patents to gain influence and royalties in the wireless industry,” said David Mixon in Bloomberg News.

Acquisition of this portfolio would enable “buyers to control and license technology used in BlackBerrys, Apple Inc.’s iPhone, and devices that run on Google’s Android operating system,” as explained in the Bloomberg News article. “(These patents) were like the crown jewel of Nortel,” Mixon explained in an article on The Next Web, “Intellectual properties – especially for tech companies…of all sizes – is very important to them. Nortel’s spent a lot of time and a lot of money building up this portfolio and to have it basically auctioned off in a bankruptcy proceeding has got to hurt them, especially in the long term.”