How much are the Blackberrys patents really worth?

BBRY has quite a few valuable patents, and they might become a decisive factor in the whole sale/strategic options debacle.

Obviously they're worth SOMETHING. But how much? Some analysts believe that the patents by themselves is worth more than BBRYs handset business at this point.

Personally I think that the value of BBRY's patents tend to be overrated.

For example, they didn't rescue them from having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in that major patent case a few years back.

Also: Microsoft, Nokia and even Apple make a nice tidy profit on licensing their patents. I'm not saying that Blackberrys patents are worthless, far from it. They might be worth around a billion dollars. Maybe two, if BBRY is lucky and somebody wants to pay through their nose for them. But if they really were as valuable as some people suggest, you'd see BBRY make a tidy profit licensing them in their quarterly results...

What do you guys think? What role will they play in the near future, and how much ate they worth?

What if BlackBerry's Patents Aren't So Valuable After All? - John Paczkowski - Mobile - AllThingsD

“[BlackBerry] clearly has a large patent portfolio, but we suspect that much of that portfolio has already been cross-licensed to other wireless companies,” Faucette theorizes. “If that is indeed the case, most traditional wireless players may already have complete (or nearly complete) access to the company’s IP.”

The problem with valuing patents is that you don't really know what they're worth until someone actually pays for them. It would be interesting to have a group of "patent estimators" go through the portfolio and attempt to assign values to them. Obviously, that's not common practice, but I think weakd all be interested in knowing what exactly they have locked away in this infamous patent portfolio.

Posted while peeking and flowing on my incredible BBQ10!

What does it say for the future of Blackberry when we are talking over what patents they owned. Sad.