Google In Battle With Its Own Lawyers

An anonymous reader writes "Google is at daggers end with a law firm it's been using since 2008, after discovering that lawyers in the law firm, named Pepper Hamilton LLP, were representing a patent licensing business that sued Google's Android partners last month. Google has claimed that Pepper Hamilton LLP never provided notice that it was hired by Digitude Innovations LLC, the firm that filed patent infringement complaints against Google's business allies."

Comments

Re:Lesson of the day:

[evilviper]

It sounds to me like you are a patent troll. If you actually made products then you would be the ones paying the license fees rather than collecting them

I very clearly explained that we don't remotely fit the definition of a patent troll. If that can't penetrate your dense exterior, your willful ignorance is not my problem. Your only rationale seems to be that you can't accept a world in which there are companies other than patent trolls making money off of patents. Enjoy living in your imaginary world.

Hardware has physical constraints, software is pure abstract math.

Describing physical constraints in software does not become easier, require less costly R&D, or cease to be innovative. You've offered no argument at all. "lalalala not listening, lalalala" doesn't help your case.

It would get reverse engineered inside of two weeks

Video codecs are very complex. There are decades old codecs that haven't been reverse-engineered, and when they do, it's only for playback. It's hard work. You've clearly never done any of it. How great that you can assume others will do all kinds of hard work for you...

If Google found it cost effective to pay the money (in the form of buying the company) to develop a new codec

Except they didn't do that at all. They bought the company for other reasons, and happened to get a codec for free. The FSF and others had to publicly urge Google to release it.

what makes you think they wouldn't have done the same thing without software patents?

If you're paying several million in patent license fees, it makes lots of sense to pay a few million to develop an alternative. If you are paying $0 for patent license fees, it makes sense to spend $0 to develop an alternative.

Re:So,

[Kalriath]

Not necessarily. The Chinese Wall is a procedure that allows a single firm to represent multiple people in a case (depending on the territory, type of case, and probably millions of other things. Not a lawyer, obviously). Even were this not the case, Digitude never sued Google, so until such time as Google itself joined itself to the case, I cannot see how a conflict of interest could arise.