Boston, MA 02/06/2014 (wallstreetpr) – The jury has failed to come to a conclusive verdict on a case pitying Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Intellectual ventures forcing a US judge to announce a mistrial on the patent case allegations. It has been two weeks since the case begun with the jury having a day to deliberate on the issue but failed to come to conclusive agreement thus leaving the judge with no choice rather than hand the mistrial verdict. Immediately after the trial Intellectual Ventures chief litigation counsel Melissa Pinocchio was quoted as saying “Mistrials are an occasional fact of life and disappointing” It looks like intellectual ventures will not settle on the verdict and have decided to appeal the verdict
Motorola on their part maintained on a statement “we continue to believe this lawsuit was based on overbroad patent claims meant to tax innovation”. The verdict seemed to be a win situation on the part of Motorola which is a subsidiary of Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). Google has always maintained that it is trying to curb software patents to make it easier for the challenging of lawsuits. This has not gone well with Intellectual ventures which maintain Congress should not weaken patent owners’ rights through their irrational actions.
Google to sell Motorola
Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently announced of its plans to dispose Motorola to Lenovo with the intention of still having a huge say on the company’s majority of patents. It is extremely difficult to determine how Motorola Patent liabilities would affect the sale in the coming days according to a Google spokesperson. There has been an ongoing battle of supremacy in the industry mainly due to issues related to patent ownership.
Intellectual ventures and other patent buyers have in the recent past been accused by the big players who own majority of the patents of burdening innovation by mainly purchasing the patents for sole the purpose of pursuing lawsuits instead of encouraging innovation. With successful lawsuits patent lawsuits can fetch huge chunks of settlement of which such kind of players have been chasing. This is not the first case by Intellectual ventures but it has a number in the pretrial stages having already agreed settlements for some of the cases. The Motorola case was the first one since IV was founded fourteen years ago.
