According to a Bloomberg report Facebook was in the bidding for a portfolio of patents being sold off by AOL before they were outbid by Microsoft.
Microsoft’s $1.06 billion bid secured 800 new patents for the company but, according to an unnamed source in the report, Microsoft will be selling off the majority of these. Apparently the company does not see all of them as essential to its current stockpile of patents.
According to a source, Facebook may be interested in the patents Microsoft is looking to offload. Such action would make sense following Yahoo suing Facebook for alleged patent infringement, with Yahoo claiming that “Facebook’s entire social network model…is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology.”
The social networking giant has already acquired 750 patents from IBM after Yahoo instituted legal action against the company, a few more rounds of ammunition would likely not be passed up.
Source: Bloomberg