Strong market for patents generated through private R&D labs
Last year ended with a flurry of deals across multimedia and telecoms
By Jake Schindler
Privately owned R&D labs offer a chance for small, focused teams of technology experts to drive innovation. Patents – and the licensing/transaction opportunities they unlock – make it possible for these businesses to compete on a level playing field with much larger tech companies and research organisations. Patent pools are an important piece of the puzzle for enabling this business model. This edition of Patent Transactions Watch illustrates several other deal models available to these entities.
We also highlight two little-noticed disclosures from recent months that hint at an SEP deal between two major players in the mobile space.
Video
LG and Vivo – possible licence/sale deal
LG Electronics assigned 47 US patents to Vivo in October.
According to Chinese media, the rights mainly relate to video codecs.
Back in 2023, LG sued Vivo in India over 4G/5G SEPs.
Previously unreported Indian court records show that case was withdrawn in July 2024.
No deal between the two companies has been announced publicly.
Orange acquires AI video decoding assets
Fondation B-Com assigned five patents to Orange in June.
b-com is a private French R&D institute active in areas including AI, 5G, and image/sound processing.
One of the patents is titled “Parallelized Video Decoding Using A Neural Network”.
The US patents listed in the assignment all have 2023 application dates.
Wireless communications
Massive Ofinno portfolio changes hands
Offino, a private US-based R&D lab, assigned 254 patents to Peninsula Technologies, LLC on 1 January.
A smaller transfer of six patents to Bloomsbury Design Labs LLC was made in November
Ofinno received 90 patents from Comcast Cable Communications in two transactions.
These rights were among the hundreds which Ofinno transferred to Comcast between 2015 and 2019.
Dominion Harbor acquires Langbo patents
Shanghai Langbo assigned over 100 telecoms-related patents to Bunker Hills Technologies LLC.
Langbo is a private R&D lab focused on 5G and other technologies.
Bunker Hills Technologies is an affiliate of Dominion Harbor Group.
HCLTech picks up telecoms assets from HPE
Hewlett Packard Enterprise assigned over 50 patents to HCLTech, an Indian IT company.
The transfer came as HCLTech completed its acquisition of HPE’s telecoms services business unit.
Other
Huawei bolsters its smart auto spin-off
Huawei assigned more than 600 patents to Shenzhen Yinwang Intelligent Technologies in November.
Yinwang was spun out of Huawei as an independent company at the end of 2024. It was originally Huawei’s intelligent automotive business unit.
The patents cover a wide range of technical areas, from communications to autonomous driving to battery charging.
Ericsson acquires Google portfolio
Google assigned 32 patents to Ericsson in November.
The patents cover innovations in areas including wearable computing devices, mobile devices and app marketplaces.
Adeia acquires networking patents from Adaptiv
Adaptiv Networks assigned 13 patents to Adeia Media Holdings LLC.
Adaptiv is a provider of “cloud-managed network connectivity solutions”.
Several of the patents deal with reducing bandwidth usage in networks.
Adeia operates licensing programmes around media and semiconductor technologies.
Transactions watch is a bimonthly Sisvel Insights feature. Our aim is to help patent owners, technology users and their advisers stay abreast of patent transfers with the potential to affect the licensing landscape. It is entirely based on public records and news reports.
The main focus is on fields of technology subject to significant standardisation – including mobile communications, wireless networking and multimedia – but we also highlight deals in other technology areas that catch our attention.
Discussion of the technology covered by various patents is based solely on keywords in the patent titles – readers can review the patents in full via the linked transaction documents.
