Who else is going to be involved in this auction? Just about any modern mobile company you can envision. In recent weeks, Apple, Intel (NSDQ: INTC), Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM), Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), ZTE, and patent holding company RPX have all been rumored or confirmed to be interested in the patent portfolio. In court filings, Nortel said that 105 parties expressed initial interest in the patents, and it whittled down that number to 40 parties who were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements and allowed to review the patents before deciding whether to bid. As a result, The AmLaw Daily thinks that Monday’s auction “could set a record for the most money ever raised in a single public sale of intellectual property assets.” How is this going to work? The parties other than Google that are interested in the patents have already submitted bids to Nortel, which is in the process of evaluating whether or not those bids are qualified to participate in the first round of the auction. That’s probably why we’re doing this a week later than originally anticipated: Nortel announced last week that due to “the significant level of interest” in the process, it would need an additional week to make sure everything went smoothly. On Monday representatives from Nortel will start the auction, revealing the subsequent bids received after Google’s initial $900 million offer. The best offer of those initial submissions will be declared the starting bid, and bidding will commence in $5 million increments from thereafter. It’s not clear if everybody will get little placards with their corporate logos to hold up when they wish to bid, or if one of the guys from the Mecum classic car auctions will be tapped to call the bids in staccato fashion. When will we know who won? Nortel and its creditors will evaluate each bid and decide whether or not it’s worthy before moving onto the next one. It’s not clear how many rounds they are prepared to go, but everybody who has submitted a qualified bid will be given the opportunity to top whoever is in the lead at the end of a round of bids. Complicating matters further, it would appear that the patents can be sold as a complete package or in pieces, according to one of the court filings. A winning bid and an alternative runner-up bid will be selected and submitted for approval by both the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Nortel’s home country of Canada. A “sale hearing” is currently scheduled for July 11th to approve the final sale, and objections can be filed to the propose sale until July 6th, so it will be a few weeks before everything is set in stone.
Quelle: http://m.paidcontent.org/article/...ut-mondays-mobile-patent-auction/
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