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Court Approves Google's Bid For Nortel's IP
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."
Can we really trust them not to "be evil" here? I'm personally suspicious of any company trying to stockpile patents...
$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.
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 [what is essentially a bankruptcy] sales first. Not shareholders. Bondholders.
Little bit of wikipedia on how the bond/equity holdings work and then no one will be pussy-sore over the fact that this money isn't going to a bunch of stupid retired fucks.
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...)
Unfortunately, that's why we call it "bankruptcy."
Kriston
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.
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.
Can we stop using the term "Intellectual Property" to refer broadly to trademarks, copyrights, and patents, which all operate under different rules and have different motivations? By lumping them all together you are muddling the important issues and giving unfair advantage to potentially undesirable ideas. It's quite simple: "Court Approves Google's Big for Nortel's Patents"
Was that so hard?
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 sales. This process encourages investment by ensuring that investors will be able to recoup some of their investment via the sale of IP assets. The NPEs then focus on extracting value from the IP assets in much the same way that a company that buys a warehouse at a bankruptcy auction might try to extract value from it by renting warehouse space to others. This is especially valuable for startups that may have significant IP assets but comparatively little in the way of tangible assets.
Here, Google will try to extract value from the IP assets in its own way. For some of the patents it means not having to take a license from whomever else might have bought them. For others it might mean adding patents to a defensive portfolio. Others might even be licensed or sold to other companies.
It's fine to argue that patents shouldn't be transferrable or that NPEs shouldn't be allowed to exist, but those policies would also prevent sales like this one and lead to less investment in companies with significant IP assets, particularly startups.
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 pensioners.
Since then, companies treat their pension trust funds like a slush fund. They underfund them, despite laws that a supposed to require full funding. And once bankruptcy comes around they grab the money and put it on the taxpayer's credit card. Not that the Congress has done anything to prevent this theft of public money.
So, if you're one of the few people left that actually gets a pension, hope you're in an industry where the union runs the pensions. Otherwise, never look at your pension benefit statement because it won't be there for you. Fully fund your 401k, and hope that your employer doesn't force 100% to be invested in company stock. The instant you smell trouble, jump ship and roll over your 401k into an IRA. Even then don't be surprised if you lose it all. There's no such thing as a safe asset. Even gold isn't safe, unless you're holding it in your hands. Futures for about 5 times more gold than exists have been sold. If everyone wants delivery, there will be another crisis as all the houses that sold gold futures collapse. Investors who shorted gold won't be able to cover. People who thought they owned gold won't actually have any. Not pretty.
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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 market works, to me.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If Google were really to stick to its motto and would like access to the brightest minds here they would pickup those pour souls lost at Nortel. The rich tank the company and buy it back for nothing later, muuuch cheaper to operate that way...my old man taught me the ways as he's been around and seen it as well as been told by his ancestors the same story of how this trick works.
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 gold futures markets: Gold clearing houses don't need to be in possession of gold they write contracts for, and most contracts are never exercised through to delivery. It's a big weakness in most commodities markets that encourages speculation, like the type that is happening in the oil market now. Most people buying oil futures wouldn't be doing so if there was a chance that they would have to take delivery. The actual numbers I saw in a article about the University of Texas taking delivery of a billion dollars of gold and how the clearing house had some difficulty doing so. That house estimated they could come up with about 5% of the gold needed to make delivery on all of their contracts. I did some Googling and found the 1/5 elsewhere.
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Aren't the products and services they took over for naught without the patents behind them? I don't quite understand how this works.
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 for a while if future prices are a lot higher than spot prices.
I suspect you're thinking not of gold futures but of gold certificates (and I believe most gold contracts are for certificates not physical gold), which people may indeed be cheating on. Governments will cheat on the currency no matter the form it takes: gold coins become "gold-ish", gold certs become less than fully backed, and fiat currency gets QE2, apparantly.
I see UT did actually get its gold, however.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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 you how to invest it, and all it takes is another well bribed bankruptcy judge to decide that 401ks are company assets for it to disappear. The only thing you can do is quit and roll it over into an IRA before that happens. (Your IRA isn't owned by you, either. The bank or brokerage holds custody of it for you until you decide you want to pay taxes on it. So far the law doesn't allow them to take it from you, except through fees. But with this congress, who knows.)
The way defined contribution pensions used to work is the company or union set up a pension fund and kept it funded according to rules set up by the government. So long as those rules were enforced, it was great. You can lose everything in a 401k. Or you might do better than you would in a defined benefit plan. But now, the defined benefit plan can be taken away by the company, too. But as originally defined, you couldn't lose everything in a DBP except through hyperinflation.
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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 still has it's fingers in the pie a bit too mich, and I agree, but an inividual account is still the least vulnerable.
Money held in a corporate pension plan are weaker - vulnerable to perverse invecntives for the company to underestimate the level of contribution required to meet the pormises made, or be acquired by a company that does. There are no structural advantages over an individual plan here, just a big target for raisers.
Money held in a government pool is the worst, since it is the easiest thing for the government to get away with raiding. For example, most people still don't realize that the US government (mostly from Reagan through Clinton) has already stolen all of the "trust fund" - stole all that money and the people barely complained.
All of which as completely orthagonal to the question of how retirement accounts should be funded so that old people aren't starving on the streets. Regardless of the form a retirement account takes, personal, employer, and governments funds can be added to that account in whatever mix you think is needed - that's a distinct discussion.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
err, "big target for raiders".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.