“Google Inc. said Friday that it has purchased technology patents from International Business Machines Corp. as the Web-search giant stocks up on intellectual property to defend itself against lawsuits,” Amir Efrati reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“The purchase was reported earlier by the blog SEO by the Sea, which said Google in mid-July recorded the acquisition of more than 1,000 patents with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,” Efrati reports. “The patents involve the ‘”fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips,’ computer architecture including servers and routers and online search engines, among other things.”
Efrati reports, “The Google spokesman declined to comment on the purchase price. It wasn’t immediately clear which of the patents might be useful to Google to shield against lawsuits… Google, of Mountain View, Calif., has been in talks to buy InterDigial Inc., a company that owns thousands of patents and licenses them but doesn’t create products, people familiar with the matter have said. Such an acquisition would cost several billion dollars.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Remember, the only patents that radiate goodness, sunshine, and light are Google patents. All others are dark instruments that stifle “innovation.”
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What happened to “competing in the marketplace”? Thank goodness they didn’t have to embarrass themselves in another auction.
http://themacadvocate.com/2011/07/11/sale-of-nortel-patents-approved-odds-of-google-not-being-immediately-sued-fransen-robinson-constant-to-1/
The Google spokesman declined to comment on the purchase price
…because he wasn’t familiar enough with the Euler–Mascheroni constant to identify it by name.
I always knew I was too dumb to understand pure math. thanks for pointing it out. 🙂
But I thought patents were evil??? according to Google.. Why doesn’t Google just “innovate” then it wouldn’t need others patents but its own
If Google try and stop other companies using patents that are important to the industry that IBM licence already, there will be many anti-competitive cases brought against them.
I don’t see how this helps them, unless IBM have patents related to technology which they haven’t used yet.
Google has become too successful that their leaders just feel their money is burning a hole in their pockets. Someday people will realize that their “free” model isn’t free. F#@! Google. They used to be cool, now they just suck.
Patents are bad if Google can’t buy them, but if they can buy Patents are the best thing in the industry.
if ibm sold those kinds of patents you can assume, i think, that they aren’t all that relevant or useful or ibm would have kept them.
Or they figured Google would overpay IBM to acquire them. Patents have a limited lifespan remember, so companies like IBM and Kodak may figure they’ll get a big one-time payment for them now from companies desperate enough to pony up for them.
So after losing the Nortel patents they stated Apple should innovate vs litigate. Curious, will do no evil transfer these patents to the open community for all to use? Right, thought not.
This is the most two faced company on the planet.
Remember when Google was a strong champion of net neutrality, against the powerful forces at work in the telecom industry? Remember how that all changed once they decided they needed to cozy up to Verizon to get Android to become popular?
Now, remember when Google was a strong champion of patent reform? Just wait a bit.
Yes, but did they get free armbands?
Google is the biggest hypocrite in techno land. If it’s other’s patents it is bad for innovation; but if it’s Google’s patents, it must be protected at all cost.
The current tech landscape leaves them little choice but to ‘patent up’ so to speak.
They can hope, and even push for patent reform but at the end of the day you have some big players with ridiculous amounts of money to block real reform.
Better to be prepared in this sue crazy extortionist environment we have going, err I mean this beautiful free market. lol.
Google is a double crosser, and only serves its own interest at all cost. Such a evil.
I hope Larry Page and his love ones will die in some form of horrific “accident” soon.
Wow. You win the award for Biggest Piece of Shit. You’d actually wish harm on someone’s family over this?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!
Surely you would retract and repent of that statement if you could. What do Page’s loved ones have to do with your anger?
This whole patent race war shouldn’t even be an issue.
Nokia, RIM, Samsung and others were all asleep at the wheel. Apple come along and reinvents what a smartphone is and can do. Now they could invent their own tech to compete, but it’s far easier to copy what Apple has done. No R & D. No risk.
Since Google have no issue ripping off other companies tech and offering it up as “open source”, someone should do it to them. I’m betting if someone opened up the secret sauce that they use in search, they’d have a sh*t hemorrhage.
No R & D cost, but they still have risk. 1) Patent problems and
2) still building junk.
They aren’t buying them to sue people, they’re buying them to stop others suing them. When Pakistan got nukes India immediately had to have them, because otherwise they were vulnerable to attack. This is the tech world’s equivalent.