Is Yahoo and Facebook Conflict About to End?
Ross Levinsohn, the interim CEO of Yahoo, along with his other board members are in advanced negotiations with Facebook executives to settle their patent issue and an agreement is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
The executives at both companies are working on a deal that will put aside the lawsuits and counterclaims between them that will eventually result in no courtroom battle over the patents.
According to sources, terms of the settlement have been finalised, which include an immense cross-licensing of patents between Yahoo and social giant Facebook and even deeper integration of Facebook into Yahoo and vice versa.
The drama started in March, when Yahoo sued Facebook over the technology patent issue as it did not license those 10 or 20 patents. This has become an alarming trend as many large internet companies are battling it out with claims of patents and counter claim to the contrary.
However, Facebook responded in the beginning of April with a counter-suit against Yahoo that defended its own patents and claimed that the struggling Internet pioneer breach on 10 of the social network’s patents. Besides, Facebook just paid Microsoft $550 million to buy and license key patents that Microsoft acquired from AOL and according to some sources, it is unexpected to do the same for Yahoo. Although, Yahoo is likely to get a huge payoff from Facebook in any settlement. It looks like Facebook is buying up all the patents so that they can fully integrate and use the technology for their social media platform without having to deal with lawsuits and counter claims.
The interesting part in this story is that the negotiation seems to be more of a group effort and all the board members are aggressively involved rather than a solo performance by Levinsohn, as the company pushes him to finally end this battle and find a viable solution now. This makes complete sense for Yahoo as they will definitely like to work things out with Facebook as they are struggling with their own issues. Try to solve this issue together is the best way for both parties as they are currently negotiating with each other.
However, to make a conclusive solution of this problem and find a common ground, the talks are being led by the Facebook’s powerful COO, Sheryl Sandberg along with her VP of partnerships, Dan Rose. It will be interesting to see what comes out of these meetings as both Facebook and Yahoo do not want to go to court and waste millions of dollars when things can be settled properly on the negotiating table.
