The portfolio was sold at the Ocean Tomo Spring 2008 IP Auction in San Francisco. The patents related to processing of digital data in bitstreams.
The buyer, bidding anonymously by telephone, outbid a competing bidder in the room, whose highest bid was $5.1 million.
The price exceeded the previous highest price paid for an IP right at auction – £2.25 million ($4.45 million) at the Ocean Tomo auction held in London in June 2007.
A total of 82 lots were on sale at today’s auction. Sixty-two percent of the lots on offer were sold, with more deals expected to be completed following the auction.
Two other lots fetched at least $1 million. One was a single patent (7,155, 739) for online identification and authentication, which sold for $1.1 million, compared to a reserve price of $300,000. The other (5,717,392) was for location based multimedia hierarchical information, which sold for $1 million exactly, compared to an expected price of $650,000.
The total value of sales made was just under $20 million, with individual patents selling for as little as $10,000.
Many of the buyers were absentee or bidding by telephone. More than 300 people attended the auction, organized in association with Gooding & Company.
The auction was part of a two-day event held by Ocean Tomo, which featured a conference programme covering leveraging IP for investors and corporate IP strategies.
