Thursday, December 16, 2004

Acacia Acquires Patents, Expands Portfolio

Newport Beach-based Acacia Research announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire the assets of Global Patent Holdings LLC, a patent holding company which owns 11 patent licensing companies. Acacia said that the acquisition would give it control of 27 patent portfolios, which includes 121 U.S. patents and foreign counterparts. The company said that it would cost it $5M in cash and 3.9M shares of stock, in addition to $2M in cash paid over two years. The patents involved include patenents on broadcast equipment, cache coherency, credit card receipt processing, file synchronization, Internet interstitial advertising and more. Acacia has been aggressively pursuing video-on-demand patent licensing lawsuits where it has inked a large number of agreements with cable TV and online websites.