[econgeeker]

You're confusing the Nortel and Novell bids. MSFT invited Google to join the group bidding on the Novell patents. The email I saw was an invitation to talk about joining, which Google refused, not a proposal of any specific terms.

Generally, it would be silly to expect Google to join a group and pay part of the bid, and not get a right to the patents, or have them encumbered. And at the same time, joining a group like this would by definition be cheaper than bidding against the group.

So, the only reason for Google to refuse to talk about joining the group to bid on the Novell patents would be if google was planning to use them against the group, if it won them.

[Steko]

"So, the only reason ... would be if google was planning to use them against the group, if it won them."

This is plainly false. Bidding in a group with many of the same companies you need potential defense against is counterproductive assuming you can win by yourself (if Google sees Microsoft, Oracle and Apple as it's primary threats it needs defense against, bidding with Microsoft Oracle and Apple obviously gives them no defense against those threats).

I'll take Google at their word that they wanted any and all of these patent pools for purely defensive reasons. Of course I have a feeling that Google's ideology is driven by circumstance and if they had 20K+ patents like Microsoft/IBM/Intel/Samsung/etc. they would be aggressively enforcing them.

I call bullshit on Google's converse claim that the other parties only wanted these patents for offensive reasons. How much has Google paid out in patent claims this year compared to Apple?

Note: the related claim that these other parties only wanted them to hurt Android was blown out of the water by Microsoft in the linked article.

[spankalee]

This should be the top comment.

If Google wants to patents to be part of a defensive portfolio to protect against lawsuits from Microsoft, then it does them no good to own the patents jointly with Microsoft.

The only good owning the patents jointly would do is take those patents out of play in lawsuits between the two, but that's not enough when you're already being attacked with other patents.

This should be abundantly clear, but apparently isn't.

[napierzaza]

Duh, if they were in on the group bid, they would be co-owners of the patents, so they couldn't be used against them. Google has a pattern of martyring itself over these sales.

Especially when they big the value of Pi for the Nortel patents. Don't you see them dancing around and wearing a jester's hat while doing it? They clearly not really trying to be serious about these sales, and then their eyes explode in tears when they lose.

[yohui]

Couldn't it be that Google wanted these patents for their defensive value against Microsoft et al.'s existing patents? IANAL, but it seems to me that co-owning them would be, at best, a wash, as neither company could leverage the patent portfolio against the other.

Moreover, co-owning would not address the issue of how to defend Android (remember that it's handset makers, not Google itself, who have thus far been sued) from Microsoft's other patents.

It's like a game player offering to exchange pieces. At the end of the day, they still have the same material advantage they started with, only with less opportunity for the underdog to turn things around.

Google didn't want to trade pieces; it wanted to win. Obviously, they lost, but it matters in this discussion who they lost to: a coalition of their rivals.

(Regarding the bid numbers: that's irrelevant. $3.14 billion is a very serious offer, no matter how you slice it. Unless you want to suggest that Google wasn't serious about their IPO, because they used the decimals of e.)

[streptomycin]

They couldn't be used against them, but they also couldn't be used as collateral against Microsoft's other patents.

[lucasjung]

>So, the only reason for Google to refuse to talk about joining the group to bid on the Novell patents would be if google was planning to use them against the group, if it won them.

I can think of at least one other reason: they saw the group bid as a potential violation of anti-trust law, and didn't want to engage in illegal (and/or unethical) behavior.

[nl]

So, the only reason for Google to refuse to talk about joining the group to bid on the Novell patents would be if google was planning to use them against the group, if it won them.

I don't think Google actually bid on these patents at all (or not much if they did). Maybe they just didn't want them.

I had the impression at the time that these patents weren't that important unless you were planning on building products with deep MS Windows integration.

Given how Google bought the random IBM patents I suspect their strategy has changed since then.

[nl]

Wow.. killed with the downvotes.

Can someone explain please?

I'm pretty sure I'm right that Google didn't bid for Novell at the time. I sure can't find any record of it.

Here's some coverage of the Novell deal: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-20005491-16.html. Google wasn't bidding at that point.