Court Approves Google's Bid For Nortel's IP 130
Meshach writes "A court had approved Google's bid to take ownership of Nortel's arsenal of $900 million worth of patents and patent applications. Other bidders will have until June 13 to submit competing offers. Unfortunately, neither shareholders of Nortel nor the company's employees waiting for a pension will see any of that money."
Since Google is an advertising company (Score:2)
Can we really trust them not to "be evil" here? I'm personally suspicious of any company trying to stockpile patents...
Re:Since Google is an advertising company (Score:5, Informative)
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Why is it that every time I see your name you seem to be trolling, and looking through recent posts does nothing to dispel that notion...?
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man, wait 'til the guys in the office get a load of this!
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as I only find good grammar intimidating, I won't be cowering from you...
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Re:Since Google is an advertising company (Score:4, Insightful)
If I've learned anything about mobile hardware, it's that it's a mine field of litigation and patents. Often the biggest complaint I hear about Android and Google is that they don't have enough patents to fight off the big guys of the mobile world - likely this is to resolve that situation.
Compared to the alternatives I still would trust them more then the others. I guess I'm from the generation that still remembers Google as the ones that, in a way, saved the Internet from itself. Without a good reliable search engine the Internet is pretty useless - Google fixed that by not allowing better rankings by paying more $$$. They proved you don't have to pull crap like that to make money. With that said Google is a company - no company should be 100% trusted, but so far I haven't been burned by them.
The biggest complaint I've heard is that Google sells my information. Well, let's see.. I use Google.com, and I use an Android phone. So far nobodys broken my legs. I haven't received excessive spam (Well, maybe, but GMail does a good job of blocking them if I have), nobody calls my phone asking to sell me stuff. So far all I've seen are... local ad's when searching. I am ok with that.
Re:Since Google is an advertising company (Score:4, Interesting)
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(Samsung already has Apple covered.)
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Depends. One of the things with these patents is that Microsoft cross licensed them. The rest is just what I have heard so take it with a grain of salt. They did a cross licenses deal in perpetuity. with Nortel. If that is true and it transfers to Google then Microsofts attacks on Android based on patents could come to a screeching halt.
So is that good? Well for a lot of Android users it is and for companies that are using android it is. For Microsoft and it's share holders it is evil. For Google shareholde
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I don't think MS are suing Google, they are suing Android handset manufacturers.
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Over Android. They say it infringes. After this purchase that may not be the case any longer.
Isn't it a sign of a broken system when a company can sue the customers for buying a product that infringes without suing the company that makes the product?
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Do the handset manufacturers buy Android? Isn't it free to use, other than the trademark which has some requirements to qualify for?
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$900M does not go very far (Score:5, Insightful)
$900M is less than what the last 3 CEO's of Nortel walked out the door with in salaries and benefits. We really really need a corporate revolution where executives are not rewarded in ridiculous amounts.
John Roth pocketed $100M in 2000.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2001/03/14/nortel010314.html
If CEO's get options they should be at only a slight discount on the current stock price and not execisable for 20 years. Long term value is what is needed. Not short term decisions which strip assets and long term strength in trade for short term magic accounting numbers.
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I think the system is working here. Companies that make smart decisions survive. Companies like Nortel that pay zillions of dollars to people running the company into the ground do not survive.
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Corollary - investors who put faith in good companies are rewarded. investors who do not are not.
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Corollary - investors who put faith in good companies are rewarded. investors who do not are not.
The problem is that many of these investors did not have much choice, they were simply working for Nortel and their pension was in company stock. If I work for a company and get a company pension I have very little choice how that is invested on my behalf. Some of these people losing out have probably worked 20 or 30 years thinking their retirement was covered and have just discovered they are redundant and also looking forward to a pennyless old age.
Actually not quite pennyless, but capped at £28,000
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The problem is that many of these investors did not have much choice, they were simply working for Nortel and their pension was in company stock.
Does anybody else think this is a very bad idea? Investments should always be diverse, and if you are going to invest everything in one company the company you work for seems a particularly bad choice.
What were the trustees thinking? (There were trustees, I hope? The US isn't daft enough to let companies manage their employee's pension schemes themselves?)
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Perhaps the company should structure the contract that way?
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Meh. All money is funny money anyway. If you believe otherwise, you need to read up on fractional reserve banking.
Stocks, dollar bills, government bonds... none of these hold any intrinsic value, and thus all of them can become worthless with a stroke of the pen.
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I think the government should make that decision. I mean, Obama killed Osama. Clearly he knows best.
Re:$900M does not go very far (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that sarcasm? You surely have not missed that those running the company to the ground and those that decided their pay were the same people? It is the common worker at such a company that suffers the consequences of the bad decisions taken by the good folks with the golden parachutes. The system is not working at all!
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The system is working exactly as it should. You are mistaken in what way the system is designed to work.
The people profiting are the ones in control of the system and implementing it. If you think this was not their intention you are very naive.
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It's too bad the employee get screwed along the way. I don't feel as bad for shareholders, but I do have some sympathy for them. The investors akin to speculators. I know some of those investors are people in a mutual fund who don't know a stock from a bond, but they're there because some other knownothing told them to buy a mutual fund share. Plus, they can't read the minds of the megalomaniacs who are the execs that are running the company into the ground and still walking away rich as if they had BUILT a
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Dang. Meant to say:
They DON'T get a dime for their efforts.
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Even better for the employee is that they are going to be working for the same CEOs again at another company.
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The employees OTOH have put a lot more equity into the company than an investor.
Well that was a pretty dumb thing to do.
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This is why that every CEO that deliberately drives a company into the ground should be tied up and shot by the workers. Because he deserves it. Golden parachutes are worthless if you can't spend it. Maybe that will put some incentive into running a company correctly. Because as it is, there is no incentive.
Seriously.
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BMO
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I'm gonna go long pitchfork futures.
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What does the "common" worker bring, outside of common skills that millions of others can bring?
If the best you can do is press a button over and over, you shouldn't feel too down about not really getting the big bucks. I know, I know... on populist Slashdot, we're all for the workers revolution. It's never worked before, but hope springs eternal in the mind of the middle class.
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yes, dumb companies do not survive, but on the way out, they destroy the economic lives of many fine upstanding workers. In this sense, the system is not working at all for them.
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If CEO's get options they should be at only a slight discount on the current stock price and not execisable for 20 years. Long term value is what is needed. Not short term decisions which strip assets and long term strength in trade for short term magic accounting numbers.
The very idea of giving stock options to high level executives is antithetical to the purpose of retaining quality executives who will make good decisions for the benefit of the company.
Options given in addition to other forms of compensation are basically bribes, and as such necessarily pointless. The person who will provide an honest day's work for an honest day's pay will not be persuaded to be any more 'honest' as a consequence. The person who insists on extra benefit above salary will always want mor
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The very idea of giving stock options to high level executives is antithetical to the purpose of retaining quality executives who will make good decisions for the benefit of the company.
Huh? If you're an exec with 100K options in Company X it's in your interest to make good decisions which in turn drive up the share value. If an exec makes bad decisions that drive down share value, it hurts *them* in the wallet. This is exactly what you want to see...
Re:$900M does not go very far (Score:4, Insightful)
If, by "good decisions," you mean illegally cooking the books to show greater profits than actually exist. That's exactly what happened at Nortel, and it was driven by executive compensation incentives. Of course, the ultimate result of those "good decisions" was the failure of the company.
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Is it your contention that you've described the norm, or do you realize that was an exceptional case?
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Don't get me started on Nortel... oh, too late...
Not when the CEO/CFO inflate the numbers to drive up the price, so that they can exercise their options before the truth came out and the price sinks. The last jackass^H^H^H^H^H^H^H CEO that Nortel had, "negotiated" a pension that if he worked there for 5 years would guarantee him a retirement salary of $500,000, and if he should die first, his wife would get $350,000. This was on top of the $27 million they had to pay him, so that he could pay his Motorola
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Your mistaken, it is only in the person's interest to drive up the stock in the short term as high as possible to cash in, if it screws the company, oh well, he got his money.
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The cult of the stock option is a cargo cult. The lavish compensation package doesn't create a good CEO any more than building a runway will create planes.
Oooh, an aviation analogy instead of automotive. Very nice.
Lavish compensation will not create a good CEO. Very true. It will, however, reward (when that compensation is in options) one that works to keep the stock prices high. Just as you don't create planes by building a runway. If you build a very large and expensive runway, however, you will attract large and expensive airplanes, the owners of which are more likely to spend a lot of money at your airport.
A 1700 foot grass strip is good for Cessna 150-
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A good option (for the employees and regular investors) would allow the CEO to buy that $1/share option only if the share price is over $2/share, and only if it has been over $2/share for the last twelve successive quarters (or over $3/share for the last ten, or over $4/share for the last eight).
Any CEO in the job for the good of the company should readily agree to that.
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How about if the CEO can exercise it whenever he wants but he can't sell the stock for 10 years after he buys it.
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I think that makes them, as "options", worthless. The CEO has to invest his own money to buy the stock (rather than have the money fronted by his broker as is done in a single-day sale), and then hold it for what could be the length of typical employment. It would make more sense for him to execute immediately if he wanted to stick with the company for ten years, which is no different than him simply buying the same number of shares on the open market (assuming he wasn't getting some sort of look-back dea
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I understand how stock options work.
And no, I don't believe just building a runway, no matter how long, will attract jumbo jets, unless there is some other attraction in the area and the jet and runway are just means to that end.
Perhaps a better analogy are the recent studies in paying students for performance.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978589,00.html [time.com]
The result of paying students for good grades? Basically, it doesn't work. Why? Because if you don't know what you need to do to get go
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Long term value is what is needed. Not short term decisions which strip assets and long term strength in trade for short term magic accounting numbers.
Yea, I have considered stock price based compensation fundamentally flawed for a while now.
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Remuneration for Company Officers
I can hear the squeals from here...
Right now corporate executives of large companies are paid very large salaries with even larger bonuses, bonuses that they seem to get even as they waddle up to the trough for a government bailout.
There is no incentive to think beyond the next quarter, or at most, next bonus period. I watched an interview on one of the news documentary shows where an official admitted he knew the bubble would burst, but was going to make money as long as he
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Why? Seriously, why? The shareholders vote the board, the board votes the salary. Who's hurt here? We're not even talking banks here, but every corporation down to little mom-pop run ones where the shareholders are family. Who cares what the CEO makes? You wanna pay less, buy stock, and vote to pay less.
But, you say, rich shareholders put in rich friends, and everyone votes everyone else up. Well... yeah. Cause they OWN the company. If I own a company, I'll pay myself whatever I please, tyvm.
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The rich shareholders don't "own" the company. They control the company. There are many other investors whose interests are ignored.
The Stock Market Is Not Your Mother (Score:1)
It does not exist to provide you with a steady flow of warm fresh milk poured into your mouth. It is thousands of other men and women looking to take money out of your pocket and put it into their own.
- Alexander Elder.
If you don't like those terms, then don't play the mother-fucking stock market. Get a life and go put your money elsewhere. If you're a Nortel pensioner, or some stupid ass pension fund who bought Nortel stock, then you ought to be smart enough to know that bondholders get paid out from [w
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Some day you will become old.
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BMO
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Then you will realize why you are going to be fucked over in your old age, when that tidy nest egg that you've built is stolen by thieves.
Because that's where we're headed. The individual investor is the chump. And it doesn't matter how educated you are on the market, those on the inside always know more than you and have more pull.
Seriously, you are 12 years old and living at home.
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BMO
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How does that kool-aid taste? Restore sanity to the dollar and sanity to fiscal matters? All I see from the tea party are demands to do the opposite. And they tie their insane fiscal policies with insane social ones. "Give the rich a break. Tax them cheapskate poor people, and make sure they can't get news from anyone but Fox. I know that 85% of welfare goes to white women, but its 'the blacks' that are the problem. And I'm not racist because I have lots of black friends. Look at this picture I dre
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Have you ever actually talked with a Tea Partier? It's amazing how the American left ascribes all sorts of beliefs to those they disagree with, without actually taking the time to learn their actual beliefs. You do make one good point: your strawman really is one evil bastard.
BTW, do you support corporate welfare in general, or just for your favorite corporation(s)? (And you do know failing to raise the debt ceiling won't mean default on the debt, right? That was just hyberbole, not ignorance, right?)
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Protip: We have a self tea partier in the thread.
He's a lunatic. As are a vast majority of them are. All you have to do is go over to the Free Republic echo chamber to get more than enough evidence that the Tea Party is composed of idiots.
And I am on the left, and I think that corporate welfare is a fucking crime. No favorite corporations. They all should stand on their own or fail on their own. The thing is, the Right confuses welfare for the rich and corporate welfare with "investing" in the "free"
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So, BMO, you say "No favorite corporations. They all should stand on their own or fail on their own." I agree. So do you support the government continuing to give money to the Planned Parenthood corporation, or not? Perhaps we agree on that as well.
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Yes. I have lots of relatives and even a few friends that are Tea Partiers. The ones who complained about having to send their children to a private school because of the Mexicans. The same Mexicans who wrecked their church. The same ones that don't mind using the N-word in their facebook posts. Beyond racism, their main concern is money, and how baby killers and black people are getting all their tax money. And how they pay so much in taxes that it's tough to afford a second house (because they didn'
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You experience with Tea Partiers mirrors mine. They've reaped the benefits of our current system and now want to deny them to future generations.
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They've reaped the benefits of our current system and now want to deny them to future generations.
Are you aware that the current system cannot be there for current generations? If there is no money, you can't be paid. Social Security has deep financial problems (mostly because the "trust fund" was spent on other things), but something close to it might be salvagable with higher taxes. I'd prefer a system where I saved for myself one where the goernment takes money from my grandchildren and gives it to me, but regardless of the form it takes it's possible.
But Medicare? You'd need to come up with anot
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Social Security is not "fine", because its cashflow negative, and that cashflow must come from the general fund, and the general fund is so damn overdrawn that we're printing money like crazy while borrowing as fast as we can. That's not a problem specific to Social Security, but it's still a problem with Social Security.
Also "we'll magically reform the entire medical system so costs will drop" is not a financial plan. It's a good idea, of course, but not an actual plan of the sort to re-assure our credit
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And beyond that, the majority shareholders of Nortel allowed the executives to take out loans from creditors, presumably because they thought it might save the company. The board could have just as easily prevented the company from going into debt, and instead liquidated it while it was still in the black so the shareholders would get something. But they didn't, and it is only fair now that the creditors get paid before them.
Pensions on the other hand ...
On Election day, this comes out... (Score:2)
Great. This comes out on election day... when the once bright star of Canadian high-tech companies is sold in pieces to various non-Canadian interests.
(trying to be as non-political about it...)
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Yeah well nortel tanked pretty hard on their own stupidity. Much like how BCE is doing.
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Wait for RIM to be next.
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Not that it will help your aunt, but this is one good reason to _not_ have a pension that is dependent on your company's survival. Not unless you are the CEO and/or wouldn't mind losing your pension.
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It's not like you get a choice in the matter. Not too long ago pensions weren't dependent upon a company's survival. Pensions needed to be prefunded, and were not considered a part of the company's assets during bankruptcy. A (Republican) judge changed that during one of GM's bankruptcies. So, of course, GM threw it's pensioners onto the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., a government run fund that guarantees pensions. So the billions that GM owed pensioners became billions that the government owes pens
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Defined benefit pension plans just need to be outlawed - nothing good can come from that practice.
401Ks (and the similar programs) work fine (just avoid stock in the company you work for - that should be illegal as a 401k choice), are immune to the sort of theft you mention, and, since those assets actually belong to us, make us the owners of the means of production (at least to some extent).
Have any links to quantity of outstanding gold futures being so high? That sounds like a misunderstanding of how the
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Defined benefit pension plans just need to be outlawed - nothing good can come from that practice.
Apart from people actually having pensions which is a good thing that comes from that practice. Have you checked what the average 401k balance is? To which you'll probably respond "That's not my fault." To which I respond in advance, "It's not the pensioners fault that their employers don't fund their defined benefit plans, either, and it's only congress's fault that pension assets can be liquidated in bankruptcy. When you're working for $9/hr it's tough to keep that 401k fully funded."
Regarding the
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You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of commodities futures markets. All contracts are delivered - if you write a corn futures contract, you will put 5000 bushels of #2 yellow corn onboard rail cars on the contract date (or a different grade at a slight, fixed discount/premium). However, a contract trades a great many times in its lifetime, and likely only the originator and final owner have any actual intrest in physical corn - and sometime not even then, as speculators might store the corn fo
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BTW, both 401ks and pension plans have both employee and employer contributions. If there's something legal that prevents employers from paying into 401ks as much as they paid into pension plans, we should fix that. But having the money in your name instead of your companies name (or worse yet, the government's name) while it grows can only be a good thing.
There's nothing about 401ks that requires employers to contribute. Mine does not. There's nothing about 401ks that prevents employers from specifying what you must invest in. In fact the design of 401ks required that the employer choose the investment manager or manage the 401ks themselves. Your employer can decide tomorrow that all 401ks need to be fully invested in the company stock. It's not really true that that money is in your own name. It's got your employer's name all over it, they can tell y
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The government can always take your wealth in any form, because they have most of the guns. Chaves stole all his country's 401k-equivalents, IIRC. But different kinds of accounts represent different levels of desparation in government theft, and it's an important distinction.
A 401k or similar program is a set of securities that you own in your name (all individual accounts are really held in a brokers name on your behalf - this has never been a problem). You point out a real problem that the company stil
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err, "big target for raiders".
That's why we call it "bankruptcy" (Score:2)
Unfortunately, that's why we call it "bankruptcy."
Patents =/= IP (Score:1)
Was that so hard?
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By lumping them together in discussions where the details don't matter, you avoid worrying about details that don't matter. I know the holy book of RMS says you have to fight this wherever you found it, but that war is lost. The world isn't getting rid of intellectual property anytime soon, no matter how amazingly utopian you're sure it will be.
Buying Patents at a Bankruptcy Sale (Score:2)
A frequent comment here on Slashdot is that patents should not be transferable or that a company should not be allowed to own a patent covering technology that it did not invent or that a company shouldn't be able to own a patent covering technology that it doesn't intend to use. Here, Google is doing all of these things, since no doubt at least some of the patents cover technologies that Google will never put into practice.
Many licensing-focused non-practicing entities got their patents from bankruptcy sa
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company should not be allowed to own a patent covering technology that it did not invent
Companies do not invent anything. Employees at companies invent things. The employees assign the patent to the companies. If you remove the ability to assign a patent, invention stops. OK, not all invention, but the invention that people are paid to do, which is probably not much more than 99% of all invention.
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Companies do not invent anything. Employees at companies invent things. The employees assign the patent to the companies.
I'm aware of this, but the distinction was not particularly important in this case. Furthermore, most of the world outside the US does not take that approach. In Europe, for example, the company is the applicant, not the inventing employee.
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Do you think paid legislators wouldn't enact a law to unlock the value of patents from escaping wealthy interests?
Do No Evil (Score:1)
How does this affect Ciena and Avaya? (Score:1)
Agreed on the shareholders (Score:3)
For the pensioners, it should be considered criminal fraud to offer a defined benefits pension without having money in the bank to back those promises.
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In the US at least, private sector pension benefits up to $5400 at age 65 (reduced for ages less than 65) are guaranteed by the PBGC. That only kicks in if the backing corporation goes bankrupt. If they don't go bankrupt, they're required to put in the money it takes to fund the benefits.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, after the Pension Protection Act, private sector pension funding is currently pretty strict with funding requirements which require a funding period of 7 years. Arguably, the fundin