TiVo’s general counsel and chief compliance officer, Pamela Sergeeff, and its chief intellectual property officer, Arvin Patel, will not be part of the company following the closure of its merger with Xperi, SEC filings reveal.
The merger of TiVo Corp. and Xperi Corp. closed earlier this week, creating one of the largest patent licensing business, with more than 11,000 patents and patent applications, falling under the Xperi brand.
As noted by this Bloomberg Law report, Xperi chief legal officer Paul Davis remains on the management team. But TiVo’s top corporate legal counsel are being bought out. Patel—who has spearheaded TiVo’s well-publicized and ongoing patent dispute with Comcast, is receiving a $1.8 million golden parachute, according to the filings $450,000 of it in cash.
Also read: TiVo Trumpets ITC’s Final Ruling—Comcast Violated Patent on Search Highlight Feature
We sent a note to Xperi Holdings reps today to try to find out how the departure of TiVo’s top legal personnel might impact the litigation with Comcast, which has been routinely mentioned as a high priority by TiVo, despite the substantial cost to maintain it. They’ve yet to respond.
It’s notable that prior to the announcement of the $1.1 billion deal, TiVo was looking to separate its products business, which makes things like the new TiVo Stream 4K OTT dongle, from the intellectual property business formed when it merged with Rovi Corp. five years ago.
Much of the logic came from the fact that TiVo was trying to sell products to a market that it was also trying to, in some cases, enforce patent licensing upon. And that hasn't always been easy to do.
In early 2017, for example, as its dispute with TiVo/Rovi ramped up, Comcast replaced TiVo with Gracenote as its metadata vendor.
TiVo viewed separating the patent licensing business as a priority. And now that operation will function under the Xperi brand name.
