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Some reports are incorrectly stating that Microsoft is buying the patents, while Microsoft's own press release clearly states that they are only licensing them for a term of 10 years.

This is almost certainly to satisfy regulators who will have final say over whether this transaction will close.

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Somehow I expect that MS will still have a strong say in how those patents are going to be used. This already happened with attack on VP8 even without any acquisition. MS hand behind it was not even very hidden. It will only get worse now.

The simple logistics of the deal make it very likely that the remaining Nokia shell company will become a patent aggressor. The only reason companies like Samsung and Motorola aren't firing off patent attacks daily is that their own substantial businesses fall risk to the same sorts of attack, leading to a sort of detente. By unloading the hardware business, the entity that remains will have all of the benefits of being a patent aggressor, with none of the liabilities.

And, naturally the one pulling the strings will be MS.

I doubt that. The remaining entity will be self-governed and will have -- to what I've seen -- no interest in or from Microsoft.

However Microsoft will have a 10-year license grant, meaning that Microsoft is immune to the beast anyways.

Microsoft can simply pay that shell Nokia to do the racket for them. Patent privateering is not news. Crooked companies who have something to lose pay non producing trolls to attack their competitors. Non producing trolls are harder to fight, and those companies stay in the shadows and avoid retaliation.

They'll simply dust off the SCO playbook. Unless the new CEO is made of very different stuff; or US legislators realise that patent aggression is the last refuge of a scoundrel, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson.

I think you mean Samuel Clemens.

Better known by his pen-name, Mark Twain.

http://www.samueljohnson.com/refuge.html

Wow, thank you. Now I know the quote predates Twain's use.

>This already happened with attack on VP8 even without any acquisition. MS hand behind it was not even very hidden.

Nokia was really starving for money and wanted to monetize their patents, and saw VP8 as a threat. Instead of waiting for it to be popular and then pounce, they pre-emptively requested Google(which is rolling in dough) to license their patents. They did spend a lot on R&D in their heyday, they're not a garden variety patent troll. If a CEO didn't try to get their patents licensed while hurting badly for money, they would be called out for it.

I fail to see any MS hand in this, hidden or not. Do you have any references to back that up?

>Nokia was really starving for money and wanted to monetize their patents, and saw VP8 as a threat.

I doubt it. It looked more like an attack on the open web. MS and Apple always didn't like open codecs. They never even implemented them in their browsers and products. Nokia is not part of MPEG-LA, so they aren't really direct competitors codecs wise. So I see no point for Nokia themselves to be such jerks as to attack open codecs. It makes more sense to do such thing for MS or Apple, and MS is in closer proximity here.

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