Google Sues Itself With Help From Intellectual Ventures

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/10/07/google-sues-itself-with-a-little-help-from-intellectual-ventures/

by padrack • 15 years ago

50 27 15 years ago

cperciva4• 15 years ago

a company with no business model outside collecting patents

Every time stories like this come up, there's a line like the above. And every time, I wonder: Why is this relevant? I could say equally well that Stripe is a company with no business model outside of taking money from credit cards; it doesn't mean that they're bad people.

The fact is, companies out-source all the time; why is out-sourcing patent infringement lawsuits any worse than out-sourcing credit card processing, overdue account collections, or web design?

outside1234• 15 years ago

the reason that's important is because the company has no products, there is nothing it can be infringing on and so there is no mutually assured destruction to reign in the madness.

duskwuff• 15 years ago

And, unlike other service businesses, a patent troll company generally provides no meaningful service to its clients -- its only product is typically "we won't sue you".

elwin• 15 years ago

The purported purpose of patents is to increase the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy. The purpose of patent trolling is the opposite: the product stops getting produced, and the amount of useful stuff decreases. That makes patent trolling more harmful to consumers than normal patent lawsuits.

DougBTX• 15 years ago

Being the devil's advocate: if a company can invent a product and earn a profit through licensing a patent for that product, is it not likley that they could reinvest more in product development by out sourcing the collection of licensing fees to a company which specialises in collecting license fees, and finding new licensees? And is this fee collecting company not a patent troll?

tzs• 15 years ago

Patent trolls generally seek royalties or one-time license fees, rather then seeking to stop production. Patent owners seeking to shut down production are generally patent owners who are trying to stop a competitor.

cperciva4• 15 years ago

It's not in the interest of Intellectual Ventures in the slightest to force people to stop infringing -- if people stop infringing, they get nothing.

If you're interested in maximizing the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy, having patents sold off to Intellectual Ventures is far better than having them continue to be owned by companies which want to do nothing other than shut down their competition.

seven_stones2• 15 years ago

Sometimes the smartest people say the...

Why is outsourcing torture any worse than outsourcing web design with WebGL? Extraordinary rendition vs. extraordinary rendering!

Hmm, maybe it has something to do with the nature of the thing being outsourced.

cperciva4• 15 years ago

Torture is bad. Is out-sourced torture any worse than in-house torture? I don't think so.

I'm not getting into the issue of whether patents are good or bad; my question here is why do people consider out-sourced patent lawsuits to be so much worse than in-house patent lawsuits?

bdhe• 15 years ago

... overdue account collections ...

This is actually an interesting point. Both collection agents and patent trolls go about asking people to pony up the payment for goods (to put it colloquially) and they both do it on behalf of a third party, for whom doing it by themselves will involve a lot more of a hassles.

The distinction comes in the fact that in the case of collection agents, the payments owed to the goods are seemingly legitimate or at least socially accepted (perhaps collection agencies that come about collecting payments after those subscription-renewal or hidden-monthly-fee scams might be construed as as much a nuisance as patent trolls). I guess socially, asking payments for ideas only seems reasonable if the persons going about asking for the payments themselves come up with the idea.

It is a little weird and subtle. Can someone come up with a better distinction?

mjdwitt2• 15 years ago

I think that it's possibly an even more basic difference. Many people are still quite unclear to adamantly opposed to the concept of paying for an idea, which means the very purpose of patent trolls is at best ethically murky to these people.

gojomo• 15 years ago

When the deal is complete, MMI will probably enjoy immunity under Google's protection-racket-fees. So IV has to race to collect from not-paid-up MMI before the deal closes.

onwardly• 15 years ago

Why couldn't Motorola just drag out the lawsuit then? Surely the pre-proceedings and a trial would take longer than it will for the Google/Motorola deal to go through.

nostrademons• 15 years ago

If investing in a company = becoming that company for purposes of news headlines, then virtually every financial firm has sued itself.

dap• 15 years ago

Agreed. Google is neither plaintiff nor defendant in this case. Not actually, not effectively (they don't own a controlling stake in IV). I came here from Slashdot to escape sensational headlines and linkbait.

yuhong• 15 years ago

Yea, and it comes from the old FOSSPatents run by Florian, BTW.

Google Sues Itself With Help From Intellectual Ventures

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