'Not a patent troll': 38,000 BlackBerry patents have a new owner

Catapult IP Innovations has big plans for its newly-acquired trove of BlackBerry Ltd. patents.

Catapult IP Innovations Inc. has big plans for its newly-acquired trove of BlackBerry Ltd. patents.

The Delaware-based company, formed specifically to acquire substantially all of the former smartphone maker’s non-core portfolio of so-called “legacy” intellectual property, agreed Monday to pay US$600 million in a deal set to close later this year.

Catapult will be acquiring roughly 38,000 issued and pending patents related to BlackBerry mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking technologies, according to the deal’s primary financier.

“This is probably among the largest [patent] portfolios ever sold,” Arif Bhalwani, chief executive officer of Toronto-based alternative lender Third Eye Capital, said in an interview.

While the dollar value is just a fraction of the US$4.5 billion fetched from a consortium of tech players in 2011 for the patent portfolio of bankrupt Canadian telecom giant Nortel Networks Inc. - that consortium included a US$770 million contribution from BlackBerry under its former name Research In Motion. The sheer number of inventions Catapult is buying is fully six times the size of Nortel’s portfolio of roughly 6,000 patents.

Bhalwani declined to name specific members of the Catapult management team, but said the company boasts “extensive experience in the IP space,” having previously “dealt with portfolios from Microsoft, IBM and other major technology companies.”