Local news

[james_davis_nicoll]

RIM to be sold?

Comments

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

If the creek don't rise...

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

They do have all those crypto patents. Someone's going to want those.

I'd like to be optimistic about everything else, but it's tough.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

A more likely lede is "BlackBerry to try and find a buyer?"

[(Anonymous)]

Like with Nortel, the patents will be sold at below value to foreign companies. Everyone with a stake in the company gets screwed.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I see absolutely no evidence for either of the assertions in this claim. How do you imagine patents are "sold"? What do you mean by "get screwed"?

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Of course patents can get sold. Americans call it "assignment" but it's effectively sale.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously. Patents are Intellectual Property which makes them property which makes them assignable and therefore saleable. What particularly irked me about the original comment was the notion of "below value". How is this different than the sale of any other asset, frankly? The value of something is what some buyer is willing to pay for it, more or less. And honestly, I'm not sure I buy the fact that Nortel's patents were sold "below value": in some respects patents' potential valuations are always inflated because the owner would hardly ever want to sell them unless they had a compelling need, and that compelling need would have a depressing effect to arrive at a real valuation or actual sale value. But there's no middle ground -- you either keep them, and never realize their value (except in using them as a collateral asset, I suppose), or you sell them at a price below that value -- there's very little room for actually trading them as a commodity.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by "get screwed"?

Yeah, what's up with that? Obviously they'd "get RIMmed".

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

One hidden benefit for local denizens is that the chances we'll continue to hear that old saw ever other day in the city might become drastically lowered.

::slowclap::

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I'm sowwy. :(

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm overly sensitive on that count; for years, the owner of a retail store I visited on a weekly basis used to insist on making that joke. Over and over and over and over and over... it wasn't at each and every visit, but he had at least a 75% hit rate over the span of at least five years. (In actual fact, the numbers are probably kinder than that, but it certainly felt like it was that much too often.)