[mstepniowski]

Patents are not used for crushing other companies. They are used for getting a fair recompensation for the IP you have created. That usually means licensing fees. Apple has acquired several licenses for their use in iOS (well-known example: h264) and, guess what, they are not whining about it.

Acquiring "bogus" patents in order to defend from legitimate ones you infringe upon is plainly evil as it twists the whole patent system (and is one of the reasons why our current patent system is broken). Incidentally, that's what Google planned to do. That doesn't automatically mean they are now an evil corporation, but it's not fair to describe the whole scheme as righteous. It's just business.

[michaelcampbell]

> Patents are not used for crushing other companies. They are used for getting a fair recompensation for the IP you have created.

That's the idea, but not the practice. Nathan Myrhvold comes to mind.

[bandushrew]

I dont understand how you can tell bogus patents from legitimate ones? legally speaking, they all look the same to me. could you give me a run down on the differences?

[mstepniowski]

I trust Google when they say that patents they wanted to buy from Novell and Nortel were "bogus".

[gvb]

No, they did not say the Novell and Nortell patents were bogus. They said most of the 250,000 patents that a typical smart phone "infringes on" are bogus.

1. The number 250,000 is clearly a made up number, but the real number is in that ballpark (order of magnitude).

2. The Novell patents numbered ~800, a very small fraction of 250,000.

3. The Nortel patents numbered ~6000, still a small fraction of 250,000.

While some of the Novell and Nortel patents likely are bogus, as a whole they are very likely to be higher quality than the other 240,000 smart phone-threatening patents out there.

[mstepniowski]

You're right. Google (in David Drummond words) called these patents "dubious", not "bogus": http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-a...

""" This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they’re really worth. The winning $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion. Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop. """

[bandushrew]

hmm? they cant be bogus from a legal POV, or they would be no good for defence.

Maybe google just meant that they didn't like them very much?

[gvb]

Even bogus patents are valuable from a legal POV. The cost of defending oneself from a bogus patent is the same as the cost of defending oneself from a valid patent, and that cost is very high, in the millions of dollars and years of wasted time.

Patents are being used as blackmail or a protection racket on the offense and as a MAD on defense. They are effective at both simply because the cost of litigation to defend against or invalidate even bogus patents is insanely high.

This is what makes patent trolls so frustrating. There is no MAD defense since they make nothing, and thus have no exposure to countersuits. On the other hand, the cost of settling is an order of magnitude less than the cost of defeating against them, bogus or not, so the logical response is to "roll over" and pay the license fee. Unfortunately, that just encourages them.