Google exec talks Nortel patent auction loss, calls for patent reform - Page 3

Yeah, my client killed a few people. But hell, the murder laws today are really sad. Who hasn't done killed an enemy or two, or thought of it? Lighten up.

Funny, Google got to this point that you honestly agree with only after bidding $3,141,592,653.58. I guess if they had won, they'd still be stupid like the rest of us and believe that the rules count.

They're a mixture of the two. and sadly due to the nature of the patent system the most valuable patents are those which are the most broadly written and thus are impossible to avoid infringing. Those tend disproportionately to be software patents. I think that haptic feedback patent is a great example of a patent that Apple could try to assert against android makers, and it is certainly a software patent in practice.

Except we had exactly this conversation in the personal audio thread, and in the Kodak thread, and in the S3 thread.

Patent is not innovation, its not the right to block someone from innovating. Its the protection of innovation from theft. If he has ideas on how to improve the system thats awesome, getting rid of patents will not improve the system.

You're absolutely correct. Google hasn't been shy about using the 700-800 patents they already have to attack any other company or mobile player that tries to get into search and/or mobile advertising. Good thing they don't have any more patents than they do. They're dangerously aggressive in protecting their turf. Just today Mozilla announced they'll be developing their own Google Chrome challenger, and even had the audacity to say they won't just be copying Google, but actually "stealing" the Android kernel to do so. Thieves. Watch how fast Google sues them just like they've sued . . umm . . . well there's ahhh, hmmm. . .

Well that doesn't matter really. You know they've sued a lot other OS developers, on-line search providers, mobile tech companies and online advertising competitors. Right?

Well regardless of the Wright Brothers, I shouldn't have used "moron" anyway. I try not to use pejoratives like that, but I fail sometimes (not frequently but sometimes).

I would still argue that patents can only "stifle innovation" if the patent is improperly granted (overly broad etc.), which is probably what happened here.

The Wright brothers are a special case and something I know a bit about. They really didn't "invent" the airplane at all, but the political powers that be at the time had a gigantic interest in keeping up the illusion that they did. The only real innovation they made at all is that patent you reference which is probably why they held on to it for all it was worth and pushed their ownership of it as hard as they did.

The reason their airplane succeeded when all others before them failed is more down to the manufacturing design of the flyer and the aforementioned political will. It had nothing to do with this particular patent because the control system was widely copied anyway. You are 100% right that it was used as a giant cudgel to keep the competition at bay while they could monopolise the market for airplanes though.

My original intention with my remarks was only to separate copyright (wildly and widely misused and completely the opposite from it's original intention), and patents (not really that far off the original intention). I don't mean to argue that there is "nothing wrong" with patents or the patent system or that it isn't misused. Just that it's not the same thing as copyright which is orders of magnitude more f*cked up.

Hundreds of obvious and easy arguments can be made as to why copyright is a joke and that it overtly *stifles* innovation on a very large scale. It's easy to see that the current copyright system should just be scrapped completely. The argument for getting rid of patents on the other hand, actually has pros and cons in my view.

in response to "patents (sometimes) help the little guy" ...

This was mentioned by someone above also, but I left that out of my equation because it's a failing of the legal system in general not patent law.

It's always been true that the average person (at least in most modern "western" countries for the last 100 years or more), gets less justice than the rich people. There is a huge tilt in the legal system towards those with money and most people know this (as we simultaneously ignore it as a society). For instance even serious human rights issues come down to getting the money to fight the thing all the way to the supreme court. Western governments can and do pass laws all the time that violate their own constitutions, knowing that they cannot be overturned until someone has the time, the energy, and most importantly the money to fight it all the way through the legal system.


Here I think I agree with you but only sometimes. Your only seeing what you want to here if you think that the little guy fighting for his patent is always a "patent troll." Sometimes it's just a little guy with his patent. Although I agree that most of the time the "little guy" will lose out and a lot of time they are trolls.

I would also argue that most of the patent trolls we hear about (certainly the majority of the ones reported in this forum), actually *lose* their argument.

Yeah, and what happened to the MacOS? It got stolen by Bill Gates (Windows) when Steve showed it to Bill, to allow Bill to make software apps for it. Of course, Apple had to settle (compromise), with Microsoft, eventually.

You'll notice that with iOS, Apple has tried not to get burned a second time! You'll see Apple protect iOS and iOS devices alot more aggressively. They've learned the hard way.

NOW he wants patent reform? I bet he would singing a totally different tune if Google had won the auction. Google is behaving like a child - oh wait - it is run by kids with just one product. The rest are all experiments.

And Google still stole a whole bunch of ideas from Apple for Android.

I don't understand why people keep saying the Patent system is broke. There would no point in inovating if you couldn't defend your technology. And shouldn't not being able to copy some ones work encourage new ideas

Because it's too easy to circumvent copyright.

Take the slide to unlock patent. Ignoring questions of novelty, it's clear what the patent does. You have an image on the screen that says 'slide to unlock' and you slide your finger across it to unlock the phone. If someone does the same thing, it's clear that they've violated the patent (again, assuming the patent is valid in the first place).

If it was copyrighted and written in Objective C, someone else could do the same thing by writing nearly the same thing in machine language - or Java - or even C++ and it would be very difficult to prove a copyright violation.


That is patently (ahem) false.

The little guy often finds a law firm to represent him on contingency. The overwhelming majority of patent law suits involving little guys work that way.

Or, the little guy can sell his patent to a patent group who will then sue the big company. The little guy benefits from the selling price of the patent.

Because most of the people arguing for elimination of the patent system never created anything in their lives and only want to leech off of others.

Yes but it's particularly serious in patent law compared to other areas. Consider copyright by comparison. I accuse you of copyright and submit my original work to the court for consideration. If my work is shown to be substantially copied by you (which is a fairly objective test) and if I can demonstrate my work has priority (again fairly objective) then I win. Otherwise I lose. Aside from a few bizarre cases such as the SCO case or the Apple case copyright suits tend to be relatively speedy.

Patent suits are open to far far more interpretation, so the legal fight will invariably be nasty, brutish and expensive. Similarly defending against a patent suit is far more expensive. So the 'little guy' is hosed on both sides of the patent legal fight. Can you find a case of a small developer being smushed by copyright law?

Can you find a counter example in the field of software patents? The closest I can think would be the Stacker case and Stac wasn't exactly a 'little guy'. At any rate is it worth the cost on the other side? The number of 'little guys' who aren't adequately protected by copyright is tiny.

In fact trolls have been empirically shown to be equally successful in their win/loss ratios and more successful in terms of damages awarded.

http://www.pwc.com/us/en/forensic-se...tion-study.pdf

Ok but you're presupposing that 'slide to unlock' is something that ought to be patentable. Slide to unlock isn't a feature that took man years of development, or required millions invested. Slide to unlock didn't require expensive safety testing. Your argument that the patent is necessary to promote hugely expensive R&D innovation is hard to apply in the case of something that can be implemented on a lazy afternoon.

Another way to ask this question, why is 'slide to unlock' patentable when 'plants versus zombies' isn't.


The software 'little guy' won't have applied for a patent in the first place, because the cost for him to patent his idea will often be greater than the cost of implementing it.

Now now, most of the people arguing against software patents are people who work creating software. Frequently people who made very important software in the past.

hrmm, let me see, would they want patent reform had they won the bid?

if you're going to copy Apple, at least do a good job.

Android’s Dirty Secret: Shipping Numbers Are Strong But Returns Are 30-40%

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=129123
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/and...rns-are-30-40/

Patents are expensive. I understand people should be paid to innovate but the government should not be in the habbit of granting patents to people who have no product on the market. Secondly, they don't even allow you to exclude others from producing your patent.

Exactly. And what if you don't have enough money to bring a product to market? Without patents, why would anyone in their right mind license your idea and give you money when they can just take the idea and run with it for free?


Lots of little guys can argue otherwise. Ask the author of Watson how flattered he was when Apple came out with Sherlock and it looked and acted a lot like his unpatented program.

Patent reform, even if we ever get it, won't affect already issued patents, the supreme court would almost certainly take issue with any attempt to retroactively legislate them out of existence.

Except given Apple had already started down the road to Sherlock 3 with Sherlock 2 it's equally likely that any patent would have been theirs, and he would have been the one litigated into submission.

That's entirely unrelated to the question I was answering. Someone asked if copyrights provide the same protection as patents and I was pointing out some reasons why they don't. The validity of Apple's patent is irrelevant. Choose a patent that you you think is absolutely valid and the point is the same.

It is easy to determine if someone has infringed a patent. You read the claims and see if the alleged infringer does the same thing. If so, the patent is violated.

It is much more difficult to tell if someone has violated a copyright. If you use the narrow definition and require it to be a near-exact copy, then it's easy to tell, but useless. It's far to easy to simply code the same thing in a different language to get around that one. If you use a looser definition of copyright, it's hard to tell when someone infringes.

None of that has anything to do with whether any particular patent is valid or not. It simply points out that BY THEIR VERY NATURE, patents are easier to identify violations.

BTW, who's playing "Oh, look. There's a badger" now?


Nonsense. You can apply for a patent for under a thousand dollars. Even using an attorney do to all the work, we've done it for well under $10 K.

Why do people who have never applied for a patent insist on posting nonsense about a subject they don't understand?

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/...eptember15.htm
Filing fee for a small entity can be as little as $165.


That simply ignores the entire premise of patents. A patent is my property. I can do what I want with it. If I can't afford to commercialize something, I can sell the patent to someone who can.

If you required commercialization, a small business would be unable to use patents in many fields where the investment required to commercialize a product is huge. Currently, inventors can get a patent and sell their invention to a business who wants to buy it. Your idea would make that impossible - and it would not be worthwhile for many individual inventors or small businesses to do anything.


Of course they do. Please do yourself a favor and learn something about the topic before posting any further.

As usual, FossPatents has a well-reasoned article on Google complaints about the patent system. Think glass houses and kettles. Perhaps the right idea but the wrong messenger.

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/

Go on, Kent, run to mummy - she will give you a lolly and put a plaster on your sore spot.
Or stop behaving like a like a little child who missed out on some sweeties.

No the issue isn't whether copyright provides the same protection as patents, the issue is does copyright in software provide adequate protection to safeguard innovation. As I've already said I think that in the very specific cases of encryption and compression perhaps it does not, but in the vast majority of the software domain it does - and I've yet to see a convincing counter-argument.


Oh come now that's simply not true. First you have the question of validity, which entails considerable questions of non-obviousness as well as a potentially extremely expensive prior art search. In software the prior art search is particularly difficult, especially with patents from the 90s. If the patent is a continuation then there may be other ways in which validity can be attacked, etc.
Even once you have established validity there is claim construction because the exact meaning of the words in the claim invariably requires additional legal discussion before the question of infringement can even be arrived at.

None of these have any analogue in the copyright system.


Except it demonstrably isn't useless, because there are a lot of software firms that protect or used to protect their works solely or mainly with copyright. Both historically and even today.


You can't separate the two issues, because validity is a fundamental part of any infringement suit. There's really no comparable question of copyright validity, because establishing it is so trivially easy by comparison.


It's not a badger it's a zombie and it's on your lawn, ok maybe it's a zombie badger. It's also relevant. The games industry is an entire sub-domain of software where patents are not used, yet there is still innovation in that domain - both in technology and in content.


You could produce a 'slide to do something' software control for a lot less than $10k. Also I imagine that this $10k patent is in an area where you've already recently patented something, probably using the same lawyer, so you already have all the relevant patent searches and prior art searches done. Trying to do a patent 'cold' I find it hard to believe that you could do it for 10k on average. If I'm wrong though that's interesting, naturally enough I've never been involved in a patent application because I'm a software developer, and to this day most software isn't patented.

Search terms: Google, suit

... and what do you find... Google is involved in at least as many lawsuits as Apple... but against it. Google seems to be infringing upon a lot of territory. Kent must be a very busy man these days.

Sore loser they may be, it is you who is the moron. Patents very much DO block innovation, and if you can't see that, you are the far greater moron here. Let's say you invent something fairly novel, whether it be software or hardware. It's pretty unique and you think you'll go far with it. Think again. If you are successful, someone WILL sue you because they hold some sort of broad, overreaching patent that you in some way inadvertently used. Either you wind up paying a bunch of trolls for licensing or you have to stop selling your product. Welcome to the US patent system. Please explain to me how patent trolls who do nothing but buy up patents to sue people are not blocking innovation. Please explain to me how patents that are so stupidly broad and obvious that you can't invent anything without stepping on one do not block innovation. Patents have become an extortion tool and little else. The little guy can't use them to protect himself. Need an example? Look up graphene and what happened when they guys who discovered it were about to patent it. They had just about everything in order and talked to a company about whether or not they'd want to license the patent. The guy flat out said (paraphrased), "No. We'd hire an army of lawyers to write a hundred patents a day to box yours in. You'd spend the rest of your life and all your money trying to sue us." Patents are just another way that the big guys have found to erect barriers to potential competition. It's getting harder and harder to get off the ground because of them. That is very much blocking innovation.

And Google bid on the patents as a defensive move. When you're that big, you NEED a warchest of patents as a deterrent, as in "You sue me over patents? Fine, I'll pull some out and sue you!", thus settling the case with patent licensing swaps and less money spent in the long run. Tell me, how many times has Google used patents as an offensive compared to a company like, say, Apple?

You obviously know absolutely NOTHING about how the patent system in the US works. Don't call people morons when you are this damned clueless.

Win: "Patents protect our innovations and IP"
Loss: "Patents need to be overhauled and are anti-competitive"

Um, sorry google but everyone pretty much sees through your hypocrisy. Next.

Hmmmm... remember, you're talking about a 34 year old comapny vs. a 13 year old company.

Give Google time, let its patent chest grow and then we'll talk.

As I mentioned before... Google has a lot of companies biting at its heels. This is what you get for ignoring the IP rights of other companies just because you consider your company above all of that corporate gobbledigook.

that is not true. go search through the history of it. apple is no better than microsoft, except, that they are good at fooling sheep into thinking they are with something somehow 'morally' better. people need to wise up.

It isn't that hard. A requirement for retaining a patent should either be manufacturing something out of it, or licencing it to someone who makes a device out of it, within a set number of years (2, maybe 3).

... and the same could be said about Google. What's your point?

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

Unlawful? Are you even aware that the intellectual property clause is enshrined in the main body of the US Constitution?

Probably not, most people are pretty ignorant about the Constitution. For example, many people, including some current Supreme Court justices, seem to think that, if a right isn't specifically mentioned in the Constitution, we don't have it, despite the 9th Amendment.

Okay then, within the past decade. It still doesn't look too good. Google has been advocating patent reform for years now and I completely agree with them. Apple is just as bad as the rest of the tech giants when it comes to patent crapola. They sue with overly broad patents and they get sued with overly broad patents. And Google has who biting at their heels? There's Oracle with the Java case that's falling apart. It's already been whittled way down and now we've come to see that Sun was happy about Google's use of the tech. Oracle is trying to grab license fees from Google and it doesn't look like it's going to work nearly as well as they'd hoped. It seems that everyone in the tech sector gets sued whether their products are legit or not, which is precisely why the patent system needs a massive overhaul.

And Google isn't "my company", and you know what? Historically, they ARE above a lot of this patent garbage. I'll give credit where credit is due, and right now, Google's track record is a lot cleaner than Apple's.

If Sun was 'happy with google using the tech' why didn't they grant them a license? Easy enough to do.

Sorry but when your trial judge talks of your 'brazen attitude' your trial is not going well.

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011...f-oracles.html

Oh, bullshit! I can't do your homework for you but let me give you a few hints... Oracle, Apple, Paypal, 1plusV, Skyhook, FTC, EU, NHN Corp. and Daum Communications (S. Korea), copyright violations - re: book scanning...

Google's short history is filled with alleged antitrust, spying, stealing... can all of these people be wrong about Google?!

Give Google another 20 years and they'll make Apple look like kids in the church choir.

[on edit: regarding the "your company" comment... it had nothing to do with "you"... I was talking about the beliefs of Page and Brin... now reread what I wrote.]

More often then not that little guy invented the shape of a square or an alphabetical list of items or some other vague thing. The delay windshield wiper didn't take an act of genius. That is one of the most famous little guy cases. In reality he was just a good at selling an idea to GM. Unfortunately his version of the wiper was inferior so they didn't want to use it. The problem is that the patent system seems to just patent ideas and not all of the hard work and engineering to actually make something happen. All of us little guys get screwed when someone takes advantage of the system for a huge paycheck. Guess who is ultimately paying for it? You deserve to be paid fairly for your work. If that isn't happening then a system can be put in place that covers just that niche, but the current patent system is a huge joke. For copyright, times are changing. The content producer will have more power to self publish and stick to short term contracts as everything moves digital.