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Google Enlarges Warchest With 1023 IBM Patents
First time accepted submitter ElBeano writes "Google has continued to beef up its patent portfolio in the face of the onslaught from Apple and Microsoft. The best defense is a good offense. 'Google is building an arsenal of patents that the company has said is largely designed to counter a "hostile, organized campaign" by companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. against the Android operating system for mobile devices. Google had already acquired 1,030 patents from IBM in a transaction recorded in July, and will obtain more than 17,000 with its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.'"
1023? That is a suspiciously round number...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Hard to believe people get paid to sift through all these garbage patents looking for infractions. What a colossal waste of productive time.
[citation needed]
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
its not about products any more its about patenting everything in sight and then screwing over other people...
Google takes these patents subject to existing cross licenses. How many competitors (such as Apple and MS) already have cross licenses with IBM that cover these?
is there an easy way to get a basic understanding of what the 1023 IBM patents are for, are they mostly algorithm patents or?
I think what's really stupid about software patents is that you can't find out what part of your software is infringing on another company's patents. That's the idiotic part. Hardware patents, of course. Samsung can learn immediately what Apple's specific complaints are. But software patents remain hidden, so that Google can't go back and change whatever code is infringing on their competitor. You don't even need to get rid of patents. Just get rid of this ridiculous veil of secrecy garbage.
Despite the flack that Google got in the past couple of years for abandoning its "Don't Be Evil" motto - at least in appearance - I still trust them more with a patent portfolio than Apple. Apple's success in blocking the sale of Samsung tablets in Europe puts them in the "Evil" category, where they use patents to block competition from access to the market.
Microsoft went the route that patents were designed for: making money by licensing patents to Android phones. Whether software patents should be allowed or not is a whole different question, but Microsoft seems to have changed its stance from killing/buying-out the competition to charging them to compete with Microsoft.
Google, on the other hand, hasn't used its patent portfolio to prevent competition from reaching the market, or to make it pay to reach the market. Until they do, I will side with them.
Am I to understand that you can buy patent protection for violating *past* alleged infractions of someone else's patents?
This seems sort of evil, to me.
Russia have more nukes than us!
So when do they expire ? why are they selling ? after all IBM makes a lot from the research it did and licensing of said patents
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Wouldn't it just be cheaper for Google to arrange a direct patent license with Microsoft and Apple rather than trying to build their own patent portfolio to try and go to war? It's pretty clear from the Lindholm email in the Oracle lawsuit that senior member of the Andriod team knew there was patent issues, which they ignored and decided to risk the legal problems later. So now instead of fairly paying their own way they are paying stupid money for Motorola and billions more buying patents from IBM and others. "Do no evil" what a joke, they are a dirty bunch of thieving bastards!
will future history remember Goggle's main significance as hastening the demise of the current patent system?
Have read several articles that suggest the 17k are not really that relevant to modern phone OS's, and were probably a waste of money.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/15/google_motorola_the_poker_chip_that_cant_be_redeemed/
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-motorola-patents-are-crap-2011-8
Wonder how useful the next 1k are?
I don't understand why Google and Apple don't just sit down and agree to let each other use all their patents. Then they really could compete on the strength of their own innovations, rather than wasting all this money on lawyers. The customers will go to the one who implements the patents better.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I have a feeling that if I were to make my own cell phone from scratch, without looking at a single patent and using only obvious ideas off the top of my head, I'd owe a lot of people a lot of money.
Uh, that's a pal and CONFIDANT. As in, someone you confide in, not someone you wanna launch into space.
Still shitting themselves over the epic Google Motorola bombshell.
Sounds like the dumb bitches are still crying over their starbucks...
Id also buyout Kodak...then tell Apple they have remove cameras from their iphones :)
It's a sad indictment that innovation has come to this.
Those of you who still believe there is value to "Intellectual Property", can you please think about where this "Patent Race" is leading us?
We've probably passed the point where any new product or innovation is safe from having an army of lawyers descend to destroy it.
Now tell me how patents "encourage innovation". Tell me how patents "protect innovators".
When the patent portfolios of a handful of the biggest corporations reaches critical mass, there won't be a single inventor or innovator who is safe or whose ideas are protected. It will stifle innovation in a much worse way than any "counterfeiting" or "piracy" ever could. There's a good chance that we've already reached that point.
No, I don't believe there is any longer a single valid argument for "intellectual property" laws, of any kind. Not trademark, not copyright, and certainly not patents.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nothing stifles technology better than a portfolio of patents.
Unfortunately the few legitimate uses for intellectual property law have now been drowned out by the sort of scum who use and trade patents and copyrights as a commodity. Looking back, the IT industry has constantly stifled itself with IP disputes that serve only as a corporate weapon against their competition, and just about every company is guilty of it.
It seems as the industry continues to grow, the more unscrupulous companies are about it. The growth of 'patent trolls' in the IT industry is especially worrying and worse still, the courts who treat these patents as legitimate legal claims. Not only does this go against the very spirit of intellectual property, it should be downright illegal.
That's the catch though, the legal system has given these practices validity and in the process invalidated the very purpose of intellectual property law.
Reminded me of IBM's siding with Oracle against Apache on the Java licensing dispute and backing OpenJDK. Then publicly lauding Oracle for putting Open Office under an Apache licence despite the disruption this would cause to the Document Foundation and Libre Office.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
Windows Phone 7 is for the mentally disabled.
Haven't they suffered enough?
Looks like they're going for a Mutually Assured Destruction policy to me.
If these patents were worth anything meaningful why would IBM sell them?
If these patents were worth anything meaningful why wouldn't IBM leverage them against Apple?
If these patents were worth anything meaningful why wouldn't IBM pit Apple against Google in a bidding war?
Does the patent war strike anyone else as being very similar to the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.?
"Look at us! Metaphorically-speaking, that is, because we don't want you looking too closely! We have lots of non-specific weapons we will never use because they would do as much damage to us as they would to you! We can't tell you exactly which of your assets they threaten, but just know that we have more of whatever we have than you have of whatever you have! So don't even think about using your... Whatever it is that you have!"
We either need someone to adapt Dr. Strangelove to this scenario (think "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Patent Office"), or perhaps we can persuade RMS to broker the first in a series of muti-generational patent-reduction treaties that will progressively reduce the number of times over the industry could potentially destroy itself from 18 million down to something more reasonable, like three.
As Captain Nero (played by Eric Bana) says in Star Trek 2009, "give them everything".
Those are some suspiciously common words...
1023 patents, 17000 patents... with numbers like these, how many of those could possibly be inventions actually worthy of patent protection?
Any company that can publish more than, say, 1 patent per month, hasn't put in the effort or investment that patents are supposed to protect.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Wasn't IBM the owner of the Jet Powered Surfboard Patent? I wonder if that was included in the deal...
If you were mentally disabled, would you know you're mentally disabled? If not, why would it bother you?
Some of them look a lot happier than me, that's for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is fighting evil done to you first, using the same evil as a weapon back, itself evil?
When the patent portfolios of a handful of the biggest corporations reaches critical mass, there won't be a single inventor or innovator who is safe or whose ideas are protected. It will stifle innovation in a much worse way than any "counterfeiting" or "piracy" ever could. There's a good chance that we've already reached that point. No, I don't believe there is any longer a single valid argument for "intellectual property" laws, of any kind. Not trademark, not copyright, and certainly not patents.http://www.airmaxflagship.com/
Are they spending tens of billions of dollars on an OS they then give away?
See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron.
My God! Perhaps I am.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
It really depends case to case, but with most of the reasonably high functioning(Unable to cook and so forth for themselves still, and mentally somewhere around the preteens) mentally disabled folk I've worked with over the years it seems to be the case that while they can be happy with their lot in life, it is frequently brought home to them that they are not "normal" and are often frustrated at their difficulties in accomplishing the same tasks you or I set about daily.
I hope they'll sue Apple into oblivion. Apple makes some nice products, but they are evil and rotten to the core.
Come on, why not 1024? Seriously!
The classic enlargment scam.
In the United States cosmonaut launches YOU into space
It mostly has pointy ones.
1023 base 10 = 1111111111 base 2
It seems like Google is getting the short end of the stick here. The patents involved (listed here: http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat&reel=026894&frame=0001) all appear to expire within the next 5 years or so. It looks like IBM is just dumping soon-to-be-worthless patents.
It's a double troll. They waste your time once when you read it, and again when you try to offer corrections. A significant portion of Slashdot and 4chan copypasta is typo-ridden for no other reason but to infuriate the more pedantic.
...but I know your pain. If you hadn't posted, I probably would've!
Google, can you please acquire a business method patent for forum trolling and then sue the world clean?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
We couldn't conduct honest business without it. Remember, trademark is about consumer protection, but it also protects a business.
You could spend years building up a product that the consumers love (say ice cream), obtaining a reputation for quality, and someone could come out with a cheap crap copy and sell it under your name. Now the reputation of your product is ruined, many consumers were screwed because they expected quality and got junk, you can't sell any more product because nobody will touch it, equating it with crap. He can't sell any either, but he doesn't care. He made a quick buck off of your name and can go onto the next.
Without trademark, this fraud is perfectly legal.
Whether patent or copyright should exist was already debated between Jefferson and Madison before the Constitution. And their concept of both was far less than what it is today.
I once heard from Richard Stallman's mouth on a conference - "I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place." - and that was a life changing moment for me. Reading this kind of news makes me sad, I suffer for the souls of those who never had the opportunity to realize they are just loosing the chance to make the world fair and good.
It looks like Google has been making up for lost time in patent acquisition, especially after its failed Nortel patent bid. While the new IP assets may ultimately serve Google well, nevertheless it's too bad that the company has to engage in an all-out patent war, simply in order for the company and its prized product to survive.