???In Technology Wars, Using the Patent as a Sword??? - New York Times Feature

[Tzafrir Cohen]

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).

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