Google Enlarges Warchest With 1023 IBM Patents 245
First time accepted submitter ElBeano writes "Google has continued to beef up its patent portfolio in the face of the onslaught from Apple and Microsoft. The best defense is a good offense. 'Google is building an arsenal of patents that the company has said is largely designed to counter a "hostile, organized campaign" by companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. against the Android operating system for mobile devices. Google had already acquired 1,030 patents from IBM in a transaction recorded in July, and will obtain more than 17,000 with its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.'"
Software (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:IBM is Selling (Score:5, Interesting)
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend." They can pass the patents to Google and let Google take the heat and fight the fight and they can generally stay out of it - for them that's good. Besides, this will surely strengthen the Google-IBM relationship and I'm sure there were other terms and conditions set out on the transfer that will be beneficial to IBM.
It should further be noted that IBM has actually taken patents for things and allowed totally free use simply to prevent anyone from controlling some fundamental technology. As far as patents go they seem like the good guys.
Re:let the patent wars begin (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually this is more likely to stop the patent wars in this part of the industry then set them off.
The thing with software patents is that their primary effect (other than to allow patent trolls to hold up people who make stuff) is to prevent a new player from entering an existing market. The existing players have a whole arsenal of software patents and anybody who wants to enter the market will be infringing a slew of them no matter what, so the existing players can sue them and enjoin them legally from entering the market. And most of the time the new entrant knows that ahead of time and just doesn't bother.
In this case the new entrant was Google, so what happened is that everybody who had been in the market for a while and had a patent arsenal started to shake them down and demand high royalties or try to keep their products off of the market, because Google has never been in the mobile device market before and so didn't have a relevant patent arsenal with which to ward of the incumbents' attacks.
What Google is doing now is buying their way into the club. (Notice that only large companies sitting on a mountain of cash can do this -- the little guy is fucked.) If they buy these billions of dollars worth of patents then they can threaten the incumbents in the same way that the incumbents are threatening them, and at the end of the day they all just end up cross-licensing and Google becomes one of the incumbents going forward.
At that point companies can go back to competing based on merit, but only those companies that can afford to buy their way into the market. The patent system excludes everyone else.
Re:just pay up already (Score:5, Interesting)
Google knew there was patent issues and they actually resolved them BY LICENSING THE VARIOUS PATENTS.
The evil part is that even though Google knew there were patent issues, they invited every other manufacturer to go ahead and just use the OS without getting their own licenses. Google fucked everyone.
That's a pretty extrordinary claim. I'd really like to see some sort of proof. Specifically that (a) google licensed the relevant patents and (b) google encouraged others to violate them. That's no joke, a citation that backs up those claims would go right into my bookmarks.