“During an interview on Monday, Google Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kent Walker opened up about the company’s loss to Apple in the Nortel patent auction, calling for patent reform in the U.S. as he characterized patents as ‘government-granted monopolies’ that block innovation,” Josh Ong reports for AppleInsider.
“Walker had indicated in April that Google was interested in a collection of 6,000 patents from bankrupt Canadian telecommunications equipment maker Nortel because ‘many of [Google’s] competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories,'” Ong reports. “The search giant succeeded in placing the initial ‘stalking horse’ bid, but ultimately lost out to a group consisting of Apple and other competitors, including as Microsoft, Research in Motion and Sony.”
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“Shortly after the auction’s results were announced, he posted a short statement describing the outcome as ‘disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition,’ but declined to comment more on the matter,” Ong reports. “In an interview with TechCrunch’s MG Siegler on Monday, Walker [said]… ‘A patent isn’t innovation. It’s the right to block someone else from innovating,’ later adding that ‘patents are government-granted monopolies.’ Though the system was originally setup to reward innovation, ‘that’s not happening here.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Translation: “We wanted those Nortel patents to protect ourselves against patent infringement lawsuits, but since we lost them to Apple and therefore can’t game the system to our satisfaction, we now want to change the game instead. Maybe greasing politicians’ palms will be easier and cheaper than buying other companies’ patent portfolios or, God forbid, actually innovating on our own.”
So, if Google really feels that patents only “block someone else from innovating,” surely whatever patents they actually do possess are now public domain, right?
Related articles:
Apple paying more than half $4.5 billion price tag on Nortel patent trove – July 22, 2011
Apple, Google gird for bidding war over InterDigital patent trove – July 20, 2011
U.S. and Canadian courts approve sale of Nortel patent trove to Apple-led ‘Rockstar’ consortium – July 11, 2011
How Apple led the high-stakes Nortel patent win against Google, sealing Ballmer’s promise – July 10, 2011
Google’s Schmidt worried and disappointed over Apple consortium’s Nortel patent win – July 8, 2011
RUMOR: Apple gets outright ownership of Nortel’s LTE (4G) patents – July 5, 2011
Google’s Android intellectual property headache looks set to become a migraine – July 5, 2011
Leaked bids show how Apple-led ‘Rockstar’ beat Google to Nortel patents – July 2, 2011
Apple consortium wins $4.5 billion Nortel patent trove auction; Google, Intel lose bidding battle – July 1, 2011
Intel gets antitrust approval to bid on Nortel patents – June 24, 2011
Apple gets U.S. antitrust approval to bid for Nortel patent trove – June 23, 2011
Apple, Intel among bidders for Nortel patent trove – June 17, 2011
Nortel delays patent auction one week citing significant interest – June 16, 2011
RIM looks to outbid Apple, Google, and Nokia for Nortel’s patent treasure trove – April 18, 2011
Google bids $900 million for 6,000 Nortel telecom patents in quest to boost patent portfolio – April 4, 2011
Apple reportedly bidding for Nortel patent portfolio – December 13, 2010
Presumably patents don’t block innovation, only copying?
Whining sore losers.
Sound familiar?…
Translation:
You change the patent system in our favor and we give the CIA and FBI unrestricted access to the most private data of your peasants.
Google is evil and dangerous.
“Don’t be Google.”℠
Google wants a Chinese or Korean Communist style system where anything goes and anyone can copy what ever they want to freely.
Oh give me a frigging break. They’re following in the fine, capitalist US tradition of years past by ripping off stuff they don’t own.
First the New York publishers and Broadway gladly ripped off British books and plays, safe from British prosecution, until they became big and rich enough to protect/litigate others on their own and prevent upstarts from invading their space.
So the upstarts in the new audio and movie business, rather than pay patent and copyright royalties to the rightful owners in the late 1800s and early 1900s, moved en masse to the deserts of California, establishing–you guessed it–Hollywood. There they were isolated and safe from the laws of the east, until they too became big and rich enough to protect/litigate others on their own, and prevent upstarts from invading their space.
How can a patent “block innovation”? Non sequitur. If one does not wish to pay royalties on a patent, then obviously one must innovate. There is some old and pithy adage about necessity and mothers…if I could only remember it.
Imagine you were shopping in a mall and decided out of impulse to swipe a couple of shirts off the hanger rail and walk out of the store without paying. Suddenly the pillar alarms sound and you get sent to the slammer for shoplifting. Would your lawyer advocate changing the criminal justice system or ask you to change your thieving ways? I think this asshole is just ranting into thin air if you ask me.
BLN & RN has a good point! 😉
Holy hypocrisy, Batman!
Thief plus loser and whiner. What else Google is?
This is why I’m glad Google lost the Nortel patent auction. With all the trolls who regularly sue Apple, there’s no question our patent system today is quite broken when it comes to technology. If Google had won, they’d have far less incentive to push for patent reform.
I’m hopeful we can figure out a way to fix our patent system so that true innovators are rewarded, while trolls and copy artists are not. (Though, Google’s vision may differ on the “copy artists” front.) 😉
patent
noun |ˈpatnt|
1 a government authority to an individual or organization conferring a right or title, esp. the sole right to make, use, or sell some invention
Government granted monopolies is exactly what they are intended to be.
I wonder if Ong realizes how much he’s twisting logic or if he really believes this. What a douchebag.
RE: “…Google Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kent Walker … characterized patents as ‘government-granted monopolies’ that block innovation…”
REPLY: They ARE government-granted lawful monopolies, because the government intends to reward those who spent the time, effort, and, sometimes, enormous sums to create the patented item.
Google thinks it should just be able to just take or employ someone else’s product or service, without license, and reap the profits.
In the internet age, this is the new definition of EVIL.
WOW, and Google doesn’t like doing business in China either, which is treats patents exactly the way Google likes.
Make up your minds won’tcha Google:)
Everyone talks about Apple’s reality distortion field, lets take a dive into Google’s:
“We were trying to buy the patents to bury them and never use them, that way everyone can use the technology. Patents block innovation because it doesn’t allow people to use other people inventions. We love innovation so much we shut down Google Labs. Everyone sucks but us because we give everything away for free. Now what’s your email again?”
I’m sure all the Pharmaceutical won’t mind……
Ok, Google make all the patens you hold public domain, then we’ll talk
Good! I hope they put their full weight behind it!
The patent system is so horribly broken in this country.
When companies are getting paid for the ownership of simple ideas, or ownership of others abilities to use pre-existing technologies together and without actually developing anything themselves there is something wrong and there is exactly where we are today.
Look at a company like lodsys, read patent 7222078 and tell me the system is working and this POS patent does not stifle innovation. Btw this is the patent that MS and Apple currently pay ‘licensing fees’ to use. Trust me if there was a way to innovate around it one of these two titans would have done that already.
Basically the patent grants lodsys ‘owernship’ over the idea of transmitting data from multiple sources over a network.
Lets say you have an online survey and plan on sending the results over an SSL connection using HTTP to a database. Pretty simple right? Nothing groundbreaking here. Well my friend you just stepped on Lodsys’s ‘rights’ and are using their ‘invention’.
Patents make sense to me when you are talking about actual inventions.
Take the famous Smith and Wesson patent for the self contained cartridge as an example of the system working – S&W patented the cartridge design and went after companies making direct copies or very similar cartridges. That makes sense.
S&W did NOT claim to own the ‘idea’ of loading a firearm and then sue every firearms maker on the planet for royalties.
The current system is absolutely broken and yes it hinders innovation. You have people raking in millions who have done nothing more than make fancy looking visio drawings that connect lines between a bunch of existing technology and then claiming ‘ownership’ over broad ‘ideas’… That is NOT what the system was designed protect.
This, this, a hundred times this. We can all argue that Google isn’t being altruistic in pushing for reforms, but we can’t (or shouldn’t) argue that reforms to such a broken system don’t make sense.
Right on ……restrained….. But right on …!
Dow
Google’s Android is a blatant hack of the iOS. I hope everyone pushing/profiting it pays up to Apple. At least the WebOS and Windows phone platforms are different in UI.
Cry babie brats!
MacHeadB have you ever pondered why Google doesn’t just quite screwing around with Andy Dung and just copy Win 7 or WebOS instead to avoid butting heads with Apple?
Either Google is freaking stupid or they are too arrogantly overconfident; instead of seriously bidding they were playing doodles with numbers. By the time they realize their mistake they have blown big time a one-time opportunity to defend Android. And now they are bitching about their loss and want to change the rule of the game.
Wow! If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with googleshit….
“patent reform”?
Yeah, right!
The patent bill is nothing less than another monumental federal giveaway for banks, huge multinationals, and China and an off shoring job killing nightmare for America.
Just because they call it “reform” doesn’t mean it is. Even the leading patent expert in China has stated the bill will help them steal our inventions. Who are the supporters of this bill working for??
Patent reform is a fraud on America. This bill will not do what they claim it will. What it will do is help large multinational corporations maintain their monopolies by robbing and killing their small entity and startup competitors (so it will do exactly what the large multinationals paid for) and with them the jobs they would have created. Yet small entities create the lion’s share of new jobs. According to recent studies by the Kauffman Foundation and economists at the U.S. Census Bureau, “startups aren’t everything when it comes to job growth. They’re the only thing.” This bill is a wholesale slaughter of US jobs. Those wishing to help in the fight to defeat this bill should contact us as below.
Small entities and inventors have been given far too little voice on this bill when one considers that they rely far more heavily on the patent system than do large firms who can control their markets by their size alone. The smaller the firm, the more they rely on patents -especially startups and individual inventors.
Please see http://truereform.piausa.org/ for a different/opposing view on patent reform.
http://docs.piausa.org/