Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle Form Patent Bloc

An anonymous reader writes "When Novell finally sold itself, part of the deal included the sale of 882 patents to a consortium backed by Microsoft. Thanks to a tip from Florian Mueller, it turns out that Microsoft's partners are Apple, Oracle, and EMC, which raises questions about where these companies are heading and what it means for the rest of the industry."

Comments

Ahh...

[itsownreward]

...the axis of evil.

Re:Ahh...

[NicknamesAreStupid]

More than AOE -- Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, EMC, and Novel are A OMEN. Great for conspiracy theorists, in spite of the bad grammar. Throw in a pentagram and your are on your way to an urban legend.

What it means

[MikeRT]

Is that it's going to get a little bit harder to run a new business that makes computer products.

I don't think there's anything we can do about this. The general sentiment is that patents make the market "fair" by "protecting inventors." The American people care more about a "fair market" than a "free market" today. If you suggest that no one has a right to make money from their ideas, only their actual products, you're seen as a cold-hearted bastard in the mold of Randroid who believes cigar-chomping fatcats should be able to keep guys working on The Next Big Thing in their garage from getting rich by stealing their ideas.

Nevermind the fact that more often than not, what the patent system really means is that the cigar-chomping fatcat can sue the guy in his garage into bankruptcy 100 times over before he can get his product to market.

Re:What it means

[poetmatt]

not at all.

if you join OIN now, they cannot sue you for any of these patents when they are acquired no matter what.

most big companies are already members, so whoopty do.

Re:What it means

[alvinrod]

The big problem is that the tech industry moves so much faster than most other industries. By the time a patent on something has expired, it's likely fallen out of use or has been supplanted by something else. Either that or its a patent that covers something so vague that it can be applied to almost any product and it takes forever (by tech industry standards) for it to expire.

There's also a horrible feedback loop because a few people have been burned by patent suits over asinine patents. To prevent this, companies patent everything and anything just so they can avoid patent trolls. If the company starts to go belly up it can bust out its patent portfolio and become a patent troll itself and the vicious circle goes around once more.

I think that most of the /. community would agree that a patent system is a good thing, but that what we have now is horribly broken and badly in need of being fixed. Of course that's easier said than done.

Re:What it means

[nschubach]

But doesn't it raise anti-trust concerns?

Couldn't this "consortium" of patent holders be construed as limiting to a new player or a common "enemy"?

Re:What it means

[metrometro]

just license the patents.

...and when Apple decides to compete with your new product, they will simply stop licensing to your company to shut you down. Remember Lala.com? Me neither.

Re:What it means

[alen]

no because it's been done for decades

how do you think VCR's and DVD players were sold from so many manufacturers? companies come together, pool their patents and you sell your product and pay part of your revenue to the consortium that goes back to the members to fund future R&D. VHS, DVD, Blu-RAM, JEDEC, bluetooth, cell phones, wifi and a long list of other technologies are funded by royalties paid to patent consortiums

Re:What it means

[alen]

except apple doesn't license any patents to anyone, industry consortiums do. same concept as open source except there is money involved. if you want to make a new cell phone, license the patents from GSM, Wifi Alliance and whoever else and add on your own tech.

Re:What it means

[braeldiil]

It's not just modern inventions, either. Look up the history of the sewing machine, and you'll see the same pattern of interdependant patents building on each other. Patent thickets and consortiums are nothing new.

Re:What it means

[E IS mC(Square)]

>> you have to pay the GSM people, wi-fi people and a long list of others who developed tech for it

Except if it's Nokia. Then, Apple does not have to pay anything, right? Right.

Re:What it means

[Anonymous Coward]

no because it's been done for decades

That's only a half-truth. All examples that you give are application- or field-limited: the WiFi alliance only issues and collects patents for wireless networking, MPEG-LA only licenses video codec implementations, JEDEC only holds DRAM storage/bus technology.

This consortium does not appear to have a clear goal, other than complete dominance over "computing" in the broadest sense. And without a mission statement (their current mission statement is "patents"), I guess that is exactly what this will be used for. I mean, having a gun in your house "for self-defense" is fine, but when you combine that with the corporate mindset of limitless entitlement and the non-accountability as demonstrated by the outcome of most anti-trust probes, it becomes very tempting to just shoot everyone that walks on "your" street.

Re:What it means

[alen]

big problem is that even toys depend on hundreds if not thousands of patents. unlike the cotton gin or the original photo camera that was one product one patent or a few patents

something like an ipod touch depends on wifi, file systems, MP3 and other audio patents, video decoding patents and the list goes on

Re:What it means

[HiThere]

It's not just the tech. industry. We notice it more than most, because we're a recent industry. The problem is that the patent system doesn't scale nicely. Something that works great when there's 5 people doing development doesn't necessarily work so well when there's 500 people doing development, and can be catastrophically bad when there's 50,000 people doing development.

There are other effects, but let's just look at one, credit assignment. At any one time there are only a certain number of "optimally positioned problems" to be solved. When the number of problems is far larger than the number of developers, then each developer will probably be addressing a separate problem. When the ratio is inverted, however, you get a different effect. So if 10 people solve a problem independently at about the same time, why should only one of them get all the credit? It's unjust.

Another problem is that monopolies are intrinsically socially harmful. Sometimes they produce more social good, then harm, but they are always harmful, and often grossly dangerous. They create points of critical vulnerability. If all development along a particular line must funnel through one entity, whether group or individual, that entity can act to destroy future development along that line. And it's often, perhaps usually, to it's benefit to do so. (So that only it can take advantage of the developments currently possible.) Thus, e.g., AT&T stalled modem development for nearly a decade. They HAD faster modems than acoustic couplers, they called them DAAs, or Data Access Arrangements, but they saw no advantage in developing them to faster speeds. They could already charge as much as they could get away with. So development of modems stalled.

And patents are legal monopolies. Some better approach is needed. One that doesn't involve the grant of a monopoly.

Re:What it means

[falconwolf]

if you want to make a new cell phone, license the patents from GSM, Wifi Alliance and whoever else and add on your own tech.

That still shuts out the little guy or gal working in the garage. How many have the millions of dollars to buy licenses?

Falcon

Enrichment program?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard that when you get enough patents together they can reach critical mass and be made into a Weapon of Mass Litigation.

Group Name

[should_be_linear]

Copyright and Research Office for Organized Knowledge Sharing

What do all these companies have in common?

[NotInfinitumLabs]

They're all involved with litigation against Google (or Google products, like Android).

More interesting is who's not on the list

[alvinrod]

More interesting than the companies on the list is the company who isn't: Google.

Strange that almost everyone involved in the consortium has some kind of axe to grind with Google. Both Apple and Microsoft have been involved in lawsuits with phone manufacturers who make Android devices and Oracle is suing Google over their JVM. EMC has fingers in several pies and some of those pies are ones that Google could conceivably want to sink fingers into as well so it's not inconceivable that they might target Google in the near future.

Could just be a group of companies looking to ward off patent trolls, but I foresee that one or more of these companies will be bringing one or more of these newly acquired patents into the fray before too long.

Re:More interesting is who's not on the list

[ducomputergeek]

IBM does, but IBM tends to use them more defensively these days. There is an unwritten rule there if you don't go after IBM, they won't come after you. And it wouldn't surprise me if these folks already had patent pooling/cross licensing terms with IBM.

Re:More interesting is who's not on the list

[dclozier]

Google already has a license for these patents via OIN. About Those 882 Novell Patents: This is Where OIN Comes In Everyone can join OIN and get a license to these patents if they do so before January 23rd of next year. I highly recommend doing this since it is free to join. (as an individual, company or whatnot)

Any doubt about their intent?

[Jerry]

Microsoft tried to fight Linux with its "253 Patents infringed by Linux" portfolio, even supplying instructions on how to attack Linux in court to a would-be buyer. But, the cockroaches scurried away into the darkness when their plans came to light.

The entire purpose of this group's combined patent portfolio will be to fight Linux and FOSS, with a goal of doing what SCO failed to do: gain "ownership" of the Linux kernel.

Re:Any doubt about their intent?

[alvinrod]

Microsoft knew that they wouldn't win in court. They just made up a number that sounded scary and started making noise. Some good old-fashioned FUD-slinging. The worst they can do is appear menacing and make it appear there's a sword hanging over the head of Linux.

Even if they could somehow "own" Linux, it wouldn't stop the FOSS community from removing the offending parts and moving something new that can't be shutdown.

Re:Maybe not to court

[molnarcs]

They probably just don't want to worry about getting sued.

I think I heard that line before... And then APPLE went after HTC waving ridiculous software patents, while their buddies at Microsoft covered the other big player: Motorola. Oracle is attacking Google directly...

The Corpocracy must defend itself

[Dystopian Rebel]

Meanwhile, somewhere in near the future...

- War Is Peace
- Freedom Is Slavery
- Ignorance Is Strength
- Monopoly Is Competition
- Fools Are Wise
- Drugs Are Health
- Torvalds Is Goldstein
- Assange Is An Unlawful Informant

The 800 pound Google gorilla...

[hilldog]

So if Google is the 800 pound gorilla can 4 monkeys standing on each others shoulders take it on?

Software Patents

[Archangel Michael]

What is needed is an arbiter that reads a patent, then tries to build what the patent describes, and if it doesn't resemble the item being sued for, then the patent is invalidated. The purpose of a patent is to secure for a limited time, the working knowledge of the item being patented. If it is not possible to build a working prototype from a patent, then the patent should be invalidated.

I'm not sure that the idea of a "process" is sufficient for a patent. Especially if all it takes to get a patent is adding "on the internet" or "using a browser" or similar. That would be obvious to people skilled in the art ... would it not? Programming a process is also not sufficient because if it is a process, then the goal of programming would be to automate the process, and anyone skilled in programming should be able to code a process given enough information about the process.

Re:Looks familiar

[Bert64]

There are already patent defense pools, if defense was the only goal then it would be easy to join such a pool (and werent many of the novell patents pledged to such pools already?)..

Re:like the old ATT?

[ArhcAngel]

The new ATT is actually Southwestern Bell or SBC Communications? They basically made several power plays over the last decade and slowly but surely swallowed up all the other bells and eventually the original ATT. They simply decided to use the existing brand recognition ATT already had.

Re:Maybe not to court

[Tetsujin]

They probably just don't want to worry about getting sued.

I would expect most of these patents, and especially the ones that matter, will expire in the next couple years. Has Novell done anything worth a patent in the last 10 years? Patents only last 20 years.

Since when do you have to do anything (apart from file a patent, I mean) to have a patent?

Re:like the old ATT?

[kill -9 $$]

Yeah but they're now a kinder gentler AT&T cause the new "death star" logo is much less threatening looking that the logo of old. The new one looks kinda like a Christmas ornament.

Re:like the old ATT?

[moeluv]

Southwestern Bell is one of the companies that was created when the original AT&T company was broken up. Essentially one of the child companies grew and swallowed up most of the other "Bells". The company also controls what was Cingular Wireless and the original AT&T wireless. Is there really so much competition now that the FCC should have allowed these mergers? Considering the new AT&T encompasses not just landline but wireless, television and internet services i'm not sure. In some areas they have a near monopoly on telecommunications.

Cats sleeping wtih Dogs...

[AntEater]

...which raises questions about where these companies are heading and what it means for the rest of the industry.

Total. World. Domination.

Analogy with the Aircraft Industry.

[zQuo]

This is a excerpted from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1678028&cid=32489738 (not my post) which I think is very relevant.

Before the United States government forced aircraft manufacturers and patent holders into the Manufacturers Aircraft Association there was a patent war that resulted in lots of litigation in the United States but no aircraft manufacturing or innovation once the patent war started.

When a real war broke out, WW1, the United States had to buy aircraft from France because the United States business ventures were more interested in lawsuits than making aircraft.

After ending the patent war by forcing everyone into a patent pool the aircraft industry in the United States took off.

There are other similar cases that plainly show how the patent system has been a failure from the beginning in serving the Constitutional requirements. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.

Note that the aircraft industry had to be forced into a patent pool by the US Government. This is another patent pool, but unfortunately controlled by a few giants. It's totally necessary to get business done, but excludes everyone else.