On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 03:09:55PM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Tue, Oct 09, 2012, Shlomi Fish wrote about "???In Technology Wars, Using > the Patent as a Sword??? - New York Times Feature": > > rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and > > Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases > > exceeded spending on research and development of new products, > > according to public filings. > > This is not entirely surprising. As an example, IBM is well-known for its > research arm, and many people assume that IBM spends a fortune on its R&D. > But a few years ago, I attended some IBM customer conference, where an IBM > executive stood up and told everyone, proudly, that the previous year, > IBM bought small companies for X billions of dollars, which was more than > it spent on its own research arm. > > So for some reason, big American corporations feel very good (and proud) > about spending huge amounts of money on mergers and acquisitions. They > feel like such mergers can never fail (although many are spectacular > failures). I think many of these so-called patent buyouts are yet another > type of merger - e.g., consider Google's buy of Motorola Mobility, is it a > merger or patent purchase?
I found what I belive to be a draft of the Stanford article: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/law/ipsc/Paper%20PDF/Chien,%20Colleen%20-%20Paper.pdf Specifically it refers to the purchace of Motorola Mobility: | Google Official Blog, We’ve acquired Motorola Mobility, | http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/weve-acquired-motorola-mobility.html | (last visited May 24, 2012); Jenna Wortham, Google Closes $12.5 Billion Deal to | Buy Motorola Mobility, | http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/google-closes-12-5-billion-deal-to-buy-motorola-mobility/ | (last visited May 24, 2012). Google has since said that of the $12.5B, $5.5 were | for patents, which is still a staggering sum. > > I don't think any of these companies are spending more on actual litigation > than on product development. If this were true, we would have seen > these companies having more lawyers than developers. I don't think this > is the case. The sums of money involved don't actually include any type of Patent Oriented Development: - Development resources spent to work around patents the company is not licensed to use. - Development and legal reosurces spent working on getting patents rather than getting products. > I also don't think it is the case that these companies are > paying billions of dollars blackmail to patent trolls - I've yet to see > a patent troll on the list of the world's richest people. Patent Trolls are a indeed managable parasites. But, as the article states, the damage is a tax. And those who can least aford to pay it are small companies. The article begins with an example of a company killed using a false patent suit (hinting it is indeed a useful blackmail weapon). -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best tzaf...@debian.org | | friend _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
