Nothing fades into oblivion. The company is obligated to liquidate its assets which includes IP. This gives a big opportunity to build new products that may be more economically viable. This would not be possible if the company would be acquired by the incumbent who will just acquire the company’s IP and sit on it.
vidarh|2 years ago
A lot of the time - especially with failing companies where the sale might happen at rock bottom prices, but otherwise too - the acquirer and seller may have very different ideas about which part of the transaction matters.
E.g. one company I co-founded sold off a business unit after we pivoted, and where to me at least the technology was the most worthwhile part - far better than the platform the buyer had. But to them the 6% of the userbase they were able to convert to paying users of their own service was what justified the sale price. And as much as I think the tech we sold them with the userbase was better, I get that to them - even if they agreed with my assessment, and maybe they didn't - it wasn't sufficiently better to them to justify replacing what they had and knew how to develop and knew how to operate (we sold the system, not the company, so none of our staff went with them).
Acquired IP gets used when it is the focus of the purchase, and the acquirer knows exactly what they want or need that IP for, but even then more so if it's e.g. patents rather than software. A lot of software acquirers thought they needed still end up languishing and eventually dying.
But I've seen so much IP "fade into oblivion" over the years. I'd say, I don't even know who currently owns the rights to the majority of the software I've personally developed in my career. Some would be easy to track down. Others near impossible.
ben_w|2 years ago
"We have no idea who owns this IP in order to ask for permission, because the company went bankrupt" comes up fairly often in discussions about copyright duration and video games.