Slashdot Mirror
Google and Apple Spent More On Patents Than R&D Last Year
parallel_prankster writes "NYTimes has an interesting article about how patents are really stifling innovation in the tech industry. Today, almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles. Of course, the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company's biggest source of profits. At a technology conference this year, Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said patent battles had not slowed innovation at the company, but acknowledged that some aspects of the battles had 'kind of gotten crazy.' It is a complaint heard throughout the industry. The increasing push to assert ownership of broad technologies has led to a destructive arms race, engineers say. Some point to so-called patent trolls, companies that exist solely to sue over patent violations. Others say big technology companies have also exploited the system's weaknesses. 'There are hundreds of ways to write the same computer program,' said James Bessen, a legal expert at Harvard. And so patent applications often try to encompass every potential aspect of a new technology. When such applications are approved, Mr. Bessen said, 'the borders are fuzzy, so it's really easy to accuse others of trespassing on your ideas.'"
Apple spend money on patenting what everybody else does, Google spends money on patenting real innovations that companies like Apple steal.
At the expense of everyone else.
I think it's more accurate to say that lawmakers enact legislation which benefits their campaign-financiers. This happens even when neither is a lawyer. However, one thing that's for sure: the campaign financiers are multi-national corporations.
The nearest I can find is this, to appear in the Houston Law Review: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2125515
Particularly these sentences on pp. 3-4:
"In 2012, Google spent $12.5B to buy Motorola Mobility and its patents, and $5.2B in 2011 on R&D. In 2011, Apple spent $2.4B on R&D but contributed more, approximately $2.6B, to a single transaction to buy patents from Nortel."
There are citations on all four figures, including a note that Google says $5.5 billion of the price for Motorola Mobility was for their patents.
The author, Colleen Chien, is actually a law professor at Santa Clara, not at Stanford. According to her CV she did her undergrad at Stanford and had a fellowship at the Stanford law school for eight months in 2006, but she doesn't list any more recent affiliation with Stanford. There is a draft of her article under Stanford's domain: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/law/ipsc/Paper%20PDF/Chien,%20Colleen%20-%20Paper.pdf
Regardless of whether this is actually the NYT's source, and why--if it is--they affiliated it with Stanford, the numbers seem good (you can find the citations on the draft linked above).
[I tracked this down by googling "site:stanford.edu apple google research and development patent" which brought up the draft I linked as the third result. After verifying that it contained the relevant information it was easy to find the listing on SSRN and to track down Colleen Chien's page at Santa Clara. Now that you know my tricks, you, too, can become a master of google-fu, and not have to rely on me to find sources for you!]
Remember Creative, the maker of Soundblaster cards? They were also one of the first makers of MP3 players. ("Less space than an Nomad, lame")
When Apple came out with its own MP3 player called the iPod, Creative sued... because it infringed on Creative's patent for a "portable device that plays MP3 files". Apple settled three months later for $100 million.
Afterwards, Steve jobs vowed never to get caught with his pants down again. When developing the new iPhone, he declared "we're going to patent it all". Basically, Creative took Apple to school on patents, and Apple learned real fast.
I'm not sure of your version of history. The patent fight was not over creating a portable device that plays mp3 files it was over menu navigation on a media player[and 5 other patents] "The patent in question was Creative self-titles Zen Patent"
FYI
"A method of selecting at least one track from a plurality of tracks stored in a computer-readable medium of a portable media player configured to present sequentially a first, second, and third display screen on the display of the media player, the plurality of tracks accessed according to a hierarchy, the hierarchy having a plurality of categories, subcategories, and items respectively in a first, second, and third level of the hierarchy "
A good article that gives a better description is here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 but the problem was more that creative had patented something "on a portable media player" not that they patented "a media player".
That's interesting. Apparently, another important factor for the early movie industry was how the local community received the movie makers. Compare Hollywood:
With Jacksonville:
Still, it's clear that they were avoiding New York, which already had a movie industry.
The slashdot headline, and, to some extent, the slashdot summary, make it sound like Google and Apple are the only ones compiling bogus patents, but it works both ways, of course. They sue other people for patent infringement, but they also get sued. The big difference is that Google and Apple really do have R&D, and really do come up with at least some things that deserve to be patented, whereas the typical patent troll has never made any positive contributions, and is simply hoping to take advantage of the fact that the patent office doesn't really care whether applications are nontrivial.
I got subpoenaed last week by a lawyer from Google, because Google is getting sued by a patent troll (I don't know the name of the company), and Google wants to use the web site in my sig, which dates back to 2001, to prove prior art and invalidate the patent. It's apparently a business methods patent. You might ask, "How do you know that they're a patent troll when you don't even know the company's name, and don't know anything about the patent other than the fact that it's a methods patent?" Well, the way I know that is that I built that site, and it required absolutely zero innovation or creativity on my part. If you take a look a the code, you'll see that it's embarrassingly amateurish -- I think it was the very first Perl code I ever wrote. I simply bought the O'Reilly book on the Perl DBI interface, and built a bog-standard web-based front end for a SQL database. The database is nothing but a digital library catalog, the sole difference being that most such catalogs keep track of a physical collection of books, whereas mine is a catalog of books that are free on the web. It also has a feature where users can write reviews.
Responding to the subpoena (as I'm legally required to do) has been and continues to be a minor pain in the ass. But it's just absurd that any patent examiner allowed anyone to patent anything that went into my web site, because it required zero originality. For that reason, I feel like I'm doing something somewhat positive for society by helping Google deliver a smackdown to this troll.
Google and Apple are probably both companies that would benefit greatly from patent reform, including the elimination of software and business method patents. The big losers would be the patent trolls.
Find free books.