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Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

One further thought on the patent portfolio. Don't forget that Motorola is widely considered to have "invented" the first practical cell phone. Their patent portfolio isn't just going to be stuff like "Using shades of gray in a UI". It's going to run deep into what constitutes a mobile device.

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Those patents would have been issued in the 70s and long since expired. Even the first generation digital cell phone patents should be mostly expired. I'm not sure how involved Motorola was in the consortiums that developed the 2G/3G/4G standards, but my impression was that they were dominated by the chipset vendors (Qualcomm etc) and the telecom guys (Nortel etc).

Of course, there were competing standards, and who primed which varies, but I don't think Motorola primed any of them.

There must be a treasure-trove of prior-art, no?

I agree, much of the early stuff will have expired, but Motorola being in the mobile biz so long probably means their waters still run pretty deep as far as core mobile functionality.

You're probably right. Motorola's own phones do not use a Motorola designed radio and haven't for many years.

When exactly do those kind of patents expire?

20 years after filing date, IIRC.

The announcement stated that they have 7,000 patents in the pipeline right now, so I would say that Motorola clearly still has a lot of important patents on modern hardware.

I'm also curious to know if the 17,000 patents number includes expired patents or only current, enforceable patents.

> Those patents would have been issued in the 70s and long since expired.

This makes sense if you're talking about individual patents, but often patents are interlinked, and with a "priority date" of a "key patent", subsequent patents can be filed and granted that effectively extend this window... these constitute a specific "patent portfolio".

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