Dust settles on ipernica, Ericsson licensing dispute

The long-running legal stoush between West Perth-based intellectual property company ipernica Ltd and Sweden-based Ericsson Inc has settled in the Federal Court on a no liabaility basis, with Ericsson agreeing to pay $30 million in cash to ipernica.

ipernica, formerly QPSX Ltd, alleged Ericsson had not paid royalties on its use of the company's asynchronous transfer mode technology (ATM) and segmentation and reassembly licence.

ipernica placed its expected royalites at five per cent of the company's global use of the product in the 2003-04 financial year, and three per cent for every year after that.

Although the terms of settlement are confidential, Litigation funds provider IMF (Australia) Ltd will receive about $4 million of the settlement after contributing $500,000 to help fund the proceedings and capitalised costs of $200,000.

ipernica said it expected that, after final calculation and payment of amounts due to its profit share partners, it will retain approximately $20 million from the settlement, which is payable on or before March 18, 2008.

Shares in ipernica opened 4 cents, or 40 per cent, higher at 14 cents each today but eventually closed up 1 cent, or 9.52 per cent, at 11 cents each.