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.'"

Comments

Do patents encourage innovation anymore?

[mykos]

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.

Re:Do patents encourage innovation anymore?

[bws111]

Yes, you can do that now, and you consider it obvious, because you have used a cell phone. You have used/seen different types of cell phones. You doubtless have read countless articles on how they work. You know what components are used in them.

Now, go back 30 years and tell us that you could have come up with a Droid or iPhone then. Not just a general idea (little handheld-device that lets you do things), but an actual, working, Droid or iPhone or equivalent. Remember, there were no Li-ion batteries, no touch displays, no GSM, no ARM processors. Even supposedly simple stuff like magnets small enough and powerful enough to make a speaker you could hear didn't exist. No digital cameras. To get from where we were 30 years ago to where we are now took thousands and thousands of innovations, damn near all of them patented.

So yes, undeniably patents encourage innovation. Furthermore, as you said, if you implemented your 'obvious' cell phone you would be infringing on many patents. The way to avoid those patents is to innovate new methods of doing things that cell phones do (which you can then patent). Make a new I/O method, etc. Or do you think we are at the end of the line for I/O, and 50 years from now we will still be using touch LED displays? I bet the real innovators are working on those things right now. And they will patent them.

Re:Do patents encourage innovation anymore?

[Sabriel]

I suspect there's a "Whoosh" floating around your post.

GP is, I believe, referring to how the patent system fails to allow for innovations that are simultaneously developed independently, whether by complete strangers or by peers known to each other in their field.

go back 30 years

We can go back much further than that. Examples of concurrent independent development abound. To paraphrase an excerpt from this article: Calculus - Newton and Leibniz. Evolution - Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Oxygen - Carl Wilhelm and Joseph Priestley. Colour photos - Charles Cros and Louis du Hauron. Logarithms - John Napier, Henry Briggs, Joost Burgi. Sunspots - Fabricius, Galileo, Harriott, Scheiner. Piston engine plane - the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont. And so and so on.

It is a very strange belief that a bureaucracy enforcing the exclusive profit of singular entities within a society of billions of creative individuals will somehow ultimately encourage innovation to flourish, rather than stifle it.

Patents dictate that the fruits of your labors are not yours to trade as you wish, if any stranger you never met and never knew "invented" those fruits "first".

The only true benefit of patents is that they document the specifics of innovation, and this aspect does not actually require any grant of exclusivity.

Re:Submission quality...

[gman003]

Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", Section VI, Lines 1-2:
1. Sun Tzu said: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
2. Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.

Re:just pay up already

[LordLucless]

So now instead of paying protection money they are paying stupid money for Motorola and billions more buying patents from IBM and others

Fixed that for you. As for Google's motivation, probably "if once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane."

Highway to Hell

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:IBM is Selling

[phantomfive]

IBM is absolutely not on the good side when it comes to patents, they are on their own side. You will never see IBM make any move unless somewhere someone has calculated that it will make them profit. And they are very, very good at making that calculation, which is why they are still in business a hundred years later. Guaranteed Google paid them for these patents, more than they are worth to IBM, and that's why they got them.

IBM is not on the good side of the patent war. They make millions every year on patents alone. They nearly sued SUN into the ground, among other patents, for a patent on drawing a line. Here is a quote by an IBM lawyer:

"maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

IBM likes their patents.