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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."
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."
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".
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?
They would ahve most likely:
A) Lost the lawsuit, and/or
B) muddied the IPO waters by fighting at this time.
This was a strategic move by Google.
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.
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.
.00009% of the company instead of .0001% of the company (numbers entirely made up). Therefore, the IPO shares are worth slightly less, and Google makes less money on the IPO. And if the market is working efficiently (and it usually is), the money lost, between Google's cash payday and the value of the unsold privately held shares, will equal more or less what those new shares would have been worth in the IPO.
That's not really the way it works. You can't issue stock for free. Stock is just a percentage of your company. With more outstanding stock, those IPO shares would be worth, say,
That being said, if you think your shares are going to be overvalued at IPO, then this strategy it works great in the long run. It's the only way a company like AOL could buy a company like Time Warner.
Now watch me hit this drive.
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.