“Google recently complained in a blog post called When patents attack Android that it is the victim of a vast anti-competitive conspiracy to enforce property-rights against Google’s fast-growing Android mobile operating platform. Google goes on to charge that competitors are wielding ‘bogus patents’ ‘as a weapon to stop’ Google’s innovation. Google specifically is complaining it is anti-competitive that a group of some of its competitors outbid Google to own Nortel’s roughly 6,000 patents,” Scott Cleland writes for Forbes.
“Prior to the Nortel patent auction, Google made a high-profile ‘stalking horse’ bid of about $900 million for the Nortel patents that it now complains are largely ‘bogus,'” Cleland writes. “Google also declared after this initial bid: ‘we hope this portfolio will… create a disincentive for others to sue Google…’ If Google was not so patently deceptive in its public relations, Google would have entitled its recent post: When Google attacks patents.”
Cleland writes, “Behind Google’s feigned indignation is an old legal adage: when the law is not on your side you argue the facts, when the facts are not on your side you argue the law, but when neither the law nor facts are on your side – you pound the table. Take note: Google is loudly pounding the table… At core, Google is furiously throwing stones at competitors from its glass house… Arguably no other Fortune 500 company has ever been more hostile to others’ property rights than Google.”
Read more in the full article here.