“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.
Sorry- the old “legal adage” actually goes like this: “When the law is not on your side you pound on the facts, when the facts are not on your side you pound on the law, but when neither the law nor facts are on your side – you pound on the table”.
Otherwise, the joke loses something in the translation…
Nice adage!
I’ll leave to the linguists how well this survives translation, but what “sounds right” might have to do with what you’ve heard first, your Harvard (Alan Dershowitz) version, or that of Federal prosecutor JJ Rosenblum from the early 1900s:
“If the facts are against you, hammer the law. If the law is against you, hammer the facts. If the fact and the law are against you, hammer opposing counsel.’”
So if intellectual property rights don’t matter to Google, then i’m sure they wouldn’t mind if I help myself to thier search algorithyms and get filthy rich with a new search engine that works just as good as Google. I think I will call it Giggle.
Patents and the patent system are anti-competitive, and no longer help the market place. However, Google’s motivations for this post are completely self-serving.
Let’s hope Google goes from pounding the table to pounding sand.
Google asserts that Intellectual Property rights are anti-competitive
COULD IT BE SOUR GRAPES IF GOOGLE HAS NO INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
It’s all part of a vast, property-rights-wing conspiracy.
Google pretends to be like Robin Hood: robbing Paul to give to Peter. Except that Google is a bad Robin Hood: it pretends to give with the right hand but take away with the left hand. Time and time again, we see this obnoxious tactic being employed by snake-oil salesmen, crooked politicians, Communist regimes, Fascists and kleptomaniac dictators.
O.K. I’ll bite – who’s the kleptomaniac dictator?
Does that make Google a hippie commie fascist dictator? Yeehaw!
Wouldnt be surprised if Appe has already developed a search engine as good as google.
Ready to turn on to deliver the final blow to put this unethical monster out of its misery.