Well if the company goes bankrupt, theoretically other companies can buy e.g. 3M's patents / processes / subsidiaries and continue their production. THe company isn't unprofitable, so it would be sold off in parts and the proceeds of the sale (theoretically) would go towards settling lawsuits.
Spin off a shell corp for each individual patent that is litigated, if a loss ever occurs, the only thing "on the line" in a bankruptcy is the single patent that presumably just lost.
presumably if the company goes bankrupt and it ows money to someone (i.e. the sued company) the assets of the troll (the patents) should go to the debtor, so hyow would this work?
Or does US law permit you to close a company keeping all it has while not paying debts?
When companies go bankrupt these days, usually there aren't enough assets left to cover the loss for creditors - Especially tech companies whose main assets are intangible IP which loses all of its value when the company goes down.
I assume their liabilities greatly outstrip the value of the code/etc that they could get. Possibly in bankruptcy some of the creditors will sell of parts of the company but its unlikely to be very public.
Well, they appear to be going bankrupt already unless I'm missing something and turning over all these assets to the bankruptcy court? At least that's what the article seemed to indicate, it wasn't overly clear on the details.
Ouch. That really sucks, because without assets there's no way to pay off that debt. Unless of course they can just file for Chapter 11? I don't know much about finance, but if they can, that would be really, really cheap!
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