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Google and Yahoo Settle Overture Lawsuit
An anonymous reader writes "Google and Yahoo have apparently settled their ongoing lawsuit involving patented on-line ad technology owned by Yahoo subsidiary Overture. (U.S. Patent 6,269,361). According to reports, Google will issue 2.7 million common shares to Yahoo in return for a license. Read more about the infringement suit here. This move is expected to lower any potential downsides to Google's upcoming IPO."
Yes, this obviously should have been posted under either Books or Apache.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Is it a common practice nowadays to use shares (IPO even) for payment?
My understanding is that if a share is not sold, you don't have a cent yet in your pocket.
The article estimated that would net Yahoo as much as an additional $149 million at the high end of Google's expected IPO price range. However, could (and would) Yahoo sell all shares at the high end price though?
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Google Exec 1: "Yahoo is suing us for the way we display ads."
Exec 2: "Yeah, but look, this IPO thing is great! Look, it's so easy. I can just create a couple million shares here and and do whatever I..."
Exec 1: "Problem solved."
lets see:
infringe on gooogles.com trademark
infringe on froogles.com trademark
infringe on gmail trademark
infringe on overture patent
track all searches via cookies and IP address
make stored information available to govt agencies
Google's just trying to get their stock out there and in the news, any way possible. Kind of strange way of doing it since they could have won the lawsuit I'm sure, but still. This is very odd behavior from Google.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Perhaps they could call the merged entity GooHoo, well it beats Yagle anyway.
Things get worse and worse everyday for Google, and to think they had months when the hype was absolutely unreal, yet they failed to capitalize. To quote Richard Russell, the guru market timer: "Google may know the web, but they know nothing about markets".
Even if Google stock falls to $1 a share (very unlikely), Yahoo would still make $2.7 million. It's not like the license costs Yahoo anything; they'll make plenty of money in any case.
... And with Google already acting like a penny stock, this is why I have no interest in the IPO.
Nah. Post it under it so we can all bitch about the color scheme.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I predict that it will come a time soon when nobody will know who owns any particular piece of IP due to complete confusion. This whole IP business is getting ridiculous. IP laws seemed to have been created for lawyers to make a living while contributing nothing to the economy.
The internet is a system that serves, among other things, as a conduit for exchanging ideas. Someone said that the internet never forgets. It is possible that most the newer patents involving software and the web are invalid due to prior art which can be found by searching the net. Someone else may have thought about it and posted it somewhere.
Is there a special place on the net where people can go and post ideas so as to make it impossible for the greedy bastards to patent them?
Just because some story involves the law doesn't mean it involves our rights online.
The fundamental precept of American law is the right. Thus all legal issues in American courts involve rights to some degree or other. All such questions of rights are inherently a question of your rights even if your are not a party to the action.
In this case the question is the right to develop and deploy certain methods of list sorting for use online. That would be your rights, as per above.
So what portion of this issue do you believe does not fit into the catagory of your rights online?
KFG
Why is this odd? It is an excellent business strategy.
First: When you are about to execute an IPO it is usually undesireable to have lawsuits hanging over your business. This is especially true when the suit is over a patent on your primary source of revenue.
Second: Settling lawsuits is common business practice even with suites that you would likely win. The cost of going to court and defending against the suit, not to mention possible damage to your company's image, is usually higher than the settlement's cost. Therefore, the settlement is viewed as a reduction in operating cost.
Finally: This particular settlement costs Google $0.00. They are literally manufacturing the "money" for this settlement. They are paying in stock. Stock that does not yet have a market value. And, any perceived loss on the potential sale of the stock is made up for by adding more stock to the IPO. It works GREAT for Google, from a business perspective.
Although this looks like a straightforward patent suit, there are more dubious motives at play here. Specifically Google was in the middle of developing a new search technology that would finally bring search technology into 93% of all North American households (world wide estimates vary based on the region). Yahoo! used the suit to dilute Google's stock price and drain their cash reserves while Yahoo! develops their own alternative solution in a partnership with MSN.
I was skeptical at first until I was given a demo of the new technology by one of my old graduate school friends who is working for Google. The tool's interface is similar to Google's current standard search interface (although a verbal UI is under development). The killer feature, the feature that would have made Google search ubiquotous, is the ability to search for physical objects. I simply typed in "my keys" and I was given a reply "Your right pocket", along with a short description of the object, the # of key, use of the keys, and their GPS location. Amazing!
My friend, who for obvious reasons must go unnamed, told me the lawsuit will force google to shut down the project because the only way they could fund it was through context based advertisements (based on the infringing patent). He did however point me to this backdoor. I can't promise it will stay up very long... especially with the Slashdot crowd using and abusing it... so check it out while you can.
My fiancee painted our bedroom this color because she finds it "soothing". I guess I've just got used to it.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
For the record, patents protect inventions (such as the Flowbee, and not ideas such as gravity (Newton), metaphysics (Descartes). I imagine that since Pascal was producing adding machines, he likely would've liked protection for his invention. The Wright brothers did not get a patent for flying, or the Bernoulli Effect, they got a patent for a machine that performed these functions. As for Mozart & Beethoven, this is not patent law- it's copyright. And yes, those two were quite wealthy back in their time.
There are people in the third world right now who are laughing at your patent laws. They're selling copies of Windows and MS Office in the streets for pennies on the dollar. Heck, they're laughing at them right here in the US. Music download has become an addictive pasttime for some people.
This is copyright law again, as the underlying issue is protecting an original work of authorship. I agree with you on this part. The copyright holders in the US are doing a terrible job of adapting to new technologies. As for patents in the Third World, like pharaceuticals, that's messed up as well. Drugs are needed in certain areas, and should be available- but companies still need to make money.
No way, that's $10,000,000 for a license. What makes you think there stock is worth anything NEAR what what it will initially sell for? I said it before and I'll say it again. In a few months, this stock will drop to its fair value of four bucks. I just a f'n search engine, come on people!
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
"If you invented something completely new and revolutionary, such as Bell's telephone..."
What a great example from an IP lawyer! The telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci. He died seven years into a lawsuit with Bell. There's even been a Congress resolution admitting he invented it.
Oh the irony.
"Patents provide an incentive to discover and invent new things, and ensure your time, money and efforts don't go to waste."
Try telling that to Meucci.
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
It's funny how you only list actual inventions that were patented, like airplanes, telephones, and flowbies. I, and most everyone else attacking the US patent system, have no objection to patents on inventions. You completely sidestepped how the US has abandoned the Mental Steps Doctrine prohibiting patents based on mental steps - software patents. Patents based on what amounts to a sequence of thoughts. Patents like this Yahoo patent.
.
If I have software to carry out this Yahoo patent, and rather than executing it on a computer I simply stare at the information and execute the described code mentally, am I violating the patent? Can a certain sequence of thoughts be a violation of the law?
And if not, if that mental process is not a violation of the law, if that mental process is not protected by patent, if that mental process is not an invention, then how the hell does a non-invention mental process become a patented invention when I take the single blatantly obvious step of simply using an ordinary old computer to speed up the exact same calculations I did mentally before?
This is not a patent on a physical process. It is a patent on a mental process and twiddling some numbers. This is not a patent on an invention, it is not a patent on an implementation. It is a patent on the idea of writing any software at all to do certain calculations.
I don't mean to yell at you. I'm angry about the US's dumbass software patents. I'd really like an explanation why "IP laywers" as a group are so keen on software patents.
>There are people in the third world right now who are laughing at your patent laws.
This is copyright law again
While it may be copyright infringment, the original poster was still correct. And not just the third world, and not just in cases of copyright infringment. Most of the rest of the world is "laughing" at our patents on software, at the notion that an end user who paid the copyright holder, or even who wrote the software himself, is violating countless patents simply running software on a plain old PC
Software should be protected by copyright. All great and wonderful. However there should be no such thing as software patents. Software should not get "double coverage" and be subject to "double restrictions". Patents were - and still should be - only granted for new and non-obvious physical objects and on new and non-obvious physical processes.
Oh, and business patents are rediculous too. Even if we were to accept the rediculous notion that a business plan was an invention, we don't need a patent incentive to encourage people to make money. The very foundation of capitalism is for businesses to compete to do it better and cheaper. And business method patents are generally software patents anyway.
One final note, if software patents and business method patents were such great wonderful and obvious things, then why is the US essentially a rouge nation in having them? Why does the US need to go around the world trying to strong-arm other nations into abandoning their well established patent laws that state that software and business methods are not inventions? It used to be that the US and the rest of the world were all quite well settled on the fact that software and business methods were not inventions. The US decides to reverse it's rules and now the rest of the world gets denied free trade unless they agree to a "Free Trade Agreement" stating they must reverse their rules as well?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
How many shares are google issuing? What percantage will end up in the hands of yahoo?
IIRC, Google is issuing about 16 million shares (not including these 2.7) in its IPO, which comprise 7% of all its shares. So percentage-wise, not really all that much.