Google and patent consortium Rockstar have agreed to settle a patent litigation suit, according to a court filing, as per a report from Reuters.
Google has signed a “term sheet” with Rockstar, which will be finalized as a settlement in the coming weeks. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed by either parties. Rockstar, a group of high power tech companies including Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Sony and Ericsson, purchased the patents when Nortel Network Corporation sold off thousands of patents as a result of going bankrupt in 2009. It paid $4.5 billion for Nortel’s huge patent portfolio in 2011, outbidding Google at the time. Rockstar sued Google and others last year for infringing those patents in its Android operating system.
The Reuters report said that Google and Rockstar have agreed to settle “all matters in controversy between the parties,” according to a filing in an Texas federal court. However, the document does not say whether Rockstar has also settled with handset makers including Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. Rockstar’s filing does not attach an exact figure to the settlement, but asks for an extra 45 days to sort out the “complexity of the transaction and the number of additional parties whose claims are concurrently being resolved”.
The news comes days after it became public that Cisco expects to take a $188 million charge to settle its own patent dispute with Rockstar, which sought royalties from at least a dozen Cisco customers.
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