One company not seen on the patent lawsuit merry-go-round is a firm named Acacia Research. Acacia is a classic patent troll: the company buys up intellectual property from other companies, and then licenses or sues companies using that IP. The company has announced that it has recently licensed 74 smartphone patents to Microsoft. These patents include technology devised by PDA pioneer, Palm, its one-time subsidiary, PalmSource, and its original operating system developer, Geoworks.
Early Palm devices, such as the landmark Palm Pilot, used a third-party operating system from Geoworks. Palm later developed its own system software, Palm OS. Back in 2002, Palm spun off Palm OS development, creating the subsidiary PalmSource. PalmSource was ultimately bought by ACCESS, a company specializing in mobile device software. IP from the four companies—ACCESS, Palm, PalmSource, and Geoworks—is covered by Microsoft's new agreement with Acacia. Palm itself licensed the technology from ACCESS, and was bought earlier in the year by HP.
Some of the patents included in this agreement are involved in a lawsuit filed by Acacia in March. The company is suing Apple, RIM, Samsung, and Motorola—though not Microsoft—for infringement of patents covering areas such as e-mail synchronization and the provision of telephony features in a personal computer.
Redmond has had run-ins with Acacia in the past, including a 2007 victory when an Acacia-owned patent covering boot-time performance enhancement was invalidated for obviousness. The decision to license these patents suggests that the software giant believes these patents to have more legitimacy than the performance one. This is no surprise, given their origin—Palm's PDAs were the clear predecessors of today's smartphones.
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