Google Acquires 222 More IBM Patents

itwbennett writes "The newly acquired patents include email management, server backup, tuning and recovery, e-commerce, advertising, mobile web page display, instant messaging, online calendaring, and database tuning. Google hasn't said why they wanted the patents, but it's a good bet they had fighting lawsuits in mind."

Comments

Re:Why not license them instead?

[darkmeridian]

(1) Google probably paid more to have exclusive rights to the patents. There's no point in having a patent that a potential defendant can go to IBM to license, thereby circumventing your lawsuit.
(2) IBM has so many patents that they are essentially lawsuit-proof. Selling these rights to Google instead of licensing them doesn't lower IBM's ability to defend itself against a patent lawsuit.

Re:'tis sad...

[wzzzzrd]

...to remember the unbridled software-building activity and creativity of 10 to 12 years ago. Now, patent-fighting dominates it all. 'tis sad....

That's not true. I for one and a whole lot of other (open source) developers just ignore all this kerfuffle and go on with our unbridled software-building activities. Everything and it's grandmother is patented nowadays, I guess just by touching the mouse and clicking a button in my own software I violate at least 20 patents plus 20 more because it's "on the internet". Add 40 to this if it's also "on a mobile device". Pffh.