Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/patent-war-goes-nuclear-microsoft-apple-owned-rockstar-sues-google/

by phenylene • 13 years ago

785 522 13 years ago

arstechnica.com

slantyyz• 13 years ago

I wonder... If Google were to pony up the cash to buy RIM, wouldn't this lawsuit go away?

grej7• 13 years ago

I would think this will definitely increase Google's interest in RIM and its patent arsenal.

raldi• 13 years ago

RIM is a co-owner of Rockstar.

cromwellian10• 13 years ago

I thought it was impossible to be more of a douchebag than Intellectual Ventures, but apparently, there's a new winner in town. It was obvious when the Rockstar bid won and you looked at who made up the group, what was going to happen.

I used to get really angry and outraged when reading stories like this, but now I'm just resigned. Patent reform isn't going to happen and this kind of predatory and unethical abuse of the system by sharks and parasites will continue as the cost of doing business.

One can only hope for karmic retribution one day.

alwaysinshade2• 13 years ago

"I thought it was impossible to be more of a douchebag than Intellectual Ventures, but apparently, there's a new winner in town."

What Rockstar is doing is very shitty, but IV takes the cake because they're a non-practicing entity. It's one thing to sue competitors for making products similar to your own, it's another to make no products and sue people who dare to make something vaguely encroaching your vaguely defined patent.

oniTony• 13 years ago

But that's exactly what Rockstar does. From the article:

Part of the company's strategy is avoiding a patent-countersuit by not having any operating businesses. Essentially, Rockstar wants to enjoy the same advantage patent trolls have, even though it's owned by direct Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft.

zmmmmm3• 13 years ago

I think RockStar is even worse because they are an NPE that is a sham front set up to further the anticompetitive business interests of two of the largest and most dominant companies on the planet. That's all the evil of a patent troll plus extra ...

axman66• 13 years ago

Hang on a sec, if the patents are found valid, and Google etc. are found infringing, then they have s/broken the law/failed make appropriate agreements so that they are then allowed by the owner of the monopoly defined by the claims to use the defined invention, and are now liable to a civil suite from the owner of said patents in order to exercise their exclusive right granted by the ownership of a letters patent/.

s/Breaking the law/Using patented inventnions/ is OK when you're Google, but an abomination if Apple/MS do it I guess? Obviously Google knew the value of the patents, and clearly knew the contents, and if it's found they continued to infringe them, then they're getting what's coming to them. If it were small companies without the resources to discover the patents they might be infringing it'd be a different matter, but this is absolutely not the case here.

Edit: law ain't broked, but Google et al potentially open to exclusion of the use of the inventions defined by the exclusive patent right.

6thSigma6• 13 years ago

Google didn't bid on these patents because they were infringing - they bid on the patents so they wouldn't get patent trolled.

glibgil• 13 years ago

Calm down. Google didn't break "the law". Intellectual property is covered by civil law. One party has to prove that a contract was broken, a patent misused or other IP misused. They also have to prove their damages. They do this in court and if they make their case then the other company has to pay for those damages. It is not a crime. It is not breaking a law. This is not a semantic issue either. It is a civil matter.

olefoo• 13 years ago

You don't understand how patents work. Patents allow you to prevent someone else from selling a product that is covered by your patent. But to do so; you have to get a court order and show that the product in question is covered by the patent in question. It's not a question of whether the defendant is doing something illegal; it's a question of whether the rights the plaintiff asserts are valid. Of course, once the plaintiff has won an order; defying it is ... ill-considered.

grej7• 13 years ago

The patent system has been out of hand for a while but the big corporations haven't complained too much about it because having huge patent portfolios themselves allowed them to build a virtual moat around their business units.

If things go nuclear and they start hemorrhaging even more legal fees, they may begin to exert more pressure to change the system.

Given some of the recent proposed legislation, hopefully the tide is turning against filing patent lawsuits as a business model.

ScottBurson• 13 years ago

I don't think any of the recent proposed legislation is intended to address a situation like this, where all the players are large companies with deep pockets.

grej7• 13 years ago

Good point. Although this particular case highlights one of the key problems in the entire system. Shell corporations with very little assets are established as the suing entity in order to shield the much larger and wealthier owners from any counter-suit liability. If that aspect of the current system were changed and you could pierce the shell corp to get at the real beneficiaries, it would alter the landscape for these cases significantly.

plumeria2• 13 years ago

Easy people, just don't buy Apple / M$ products! They are trying to stop innovation...

ekianjo9• 13 years ago

Yeah, that's the right thing to do. Punish the ones who use Patents to attack other companies.

37prime7• 13 years ago

So you’d punish Google too?

Edit: Cached version instead of the bloodsucking WSJ paywalled version. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zoneG32...

mattkrea• 13 years ago

<sarcasm>Yep, sure thing. Apple stops innovation. Nail on the head. </sarcasm>

leeoniya• 13 years ago

i know this will get downvoted, and i've avoided doing this until now, but it's just too appropriate here

http://images.wikia.com/random-ness/images/3/34/Michael_Jack...

unimpressive• 13 years ago

If you must post a gif, you could at least add to the conversation first.

And no, predicting your karma decrease doesn't count.

rurounijones2• 13 years ago

'One patent filed in 1997, for a "navigation tool for graphical user interface," describes a way of navigating through electronic documents. Another describes an "Internet protocol filter," and a third patent describes an "integrated message center."'

Well with earth-shaking innovative patents like that I hope they succeed.

I would never have thought of an integrated message center for anything.

grej7• 13 years ago

...a third patent describes an "integrated message center."

This is just comically ridiculous. The only benefit to Google being the target of this suit is that if it goes all the way, there is a chance that some of these might be invalidated because at least they have the cash reserves to stand and fight (if they choose to do so).

axman66• 13 years ago

Have you read the patent?

axman66• 13 years ago

reads half line description which outlines not a single important feature of the patent Yep, obviously these are shippy patents, I better not read them!

What a joke, this is why I always get angry when reading anything about patents on HN, everyone is so uneducated and seemingly proud of it.

rurounijones2• 13 years ago

I actually used to read patents when they came up in the news (as much as I could understand them anyway, patent English is, ironically, not the clearest language).

However having done so quite a few times with tech patents and finding them to be pathetically simple / obvious (Or unintelligible due to the cryptic patentese) I am now jaded enough that I do dismiss them.

Should I? Probably not, I am sure there are a few diamonds that I have dismissed, however I am pretty confident that statistically I am not missing much.

[EDIT] Just went through https://www.google.com/patents/US6037937 quickly ... it has not changed my opinion.

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

Please, make it stop. Make it stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP. How many billions of dollars are these companies going to flush down the drain on legal fees that could be better spent doing just about anything else?

When Wired visited Rockstar's Ontario headquarters, it found 10 reverse-engineering experts, working daily to take apart products and find patent infringement.
With just a few dozen employees, Rockstar is hoping to convince more than 100 technology companies to pay it patent licensing fees for a huge array of products. "Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

Oh fuck these guys.

ulfw• 13 years ago

It's how America runs. Have you asked a doctor how much he pays for legal fees/malpractise insurance? It's the laywers who run this place

ac29• 13 years ago

Malpractice insurance is probably way cheaper than you think: http://truecostofhealthcare.org/malpractice

A few thousand a year. Its a common misconception that its expensive, or plays more than a tiny role in the cost of health care.

Apocryphon4• 13 years ago

Pretty sure the untaxable offshore holdings of all of these guys are a drop in the bucket in legal fees. This is just a sideshow.

shmerl• 13 years ago

Google should sue them for racket or find some other way to smash these trolls down.

monsterix• 13 years ago

racket

That's an interesting choice of word!

bpodgursky• 13 years ago

I know it's been said before, but to reiterate: outrage doesn't help anything, but buying products from these companies DOES hurt. If you're truly outraged enough to want to take action, take action

- writing to your representatives

- donating to the EFF or other organizations

- by not donating another $2k to Apple for a new Mac*, implicitly endorsing these bullshit tactics

- not developing for those platforms (App Store, etc)

Leaving comments here expressing outrage isn't really helping.

ekianjo9• 13 years ago

"Don't buy Macs" is not going to work well around here. Most HNers develop software on Mac and see it as the ideal development platform. I'd say they don't care about what Apple does (it's not the first time Apple does that either).

throwaway986044• 13 years ago

I'm honestly starting to regret choosing to learn Objective-C now. I am seriously considering learning Android development and ditching my Macbook / iPhone for a Nexus 5 and some sort of linux distro. People like me are making this whole situation significantly worse by contributing software to Apple's platform.

yuhong• 13 years ago

And Apple is not the only company in this consortium

dchichkov• 13 years ago

Linux is an ideal development platform. Mac is an ideal procrastination platform ;)

cheald3• 13 years ago

With the exception of iOS developers, I think that most developers would find that development is actually much nicer in Linux than it is in OS X.

The amount of pain involved in setting up a coherent development environment in OS X is almost comical after setting up an equivalent in Ubuntu or Fedora.

panarky2• 13 years ago

Macs may be better, but this has gone beyond healthy competition. This is not right, and we must do what we can to stop it.

Deploying this patent portfolio offensively can only postpone innovation. It's bad for customers, it's bad for the industry, and I'd argue it's bad for humanity.

Coincidentally, Google released Android 4.4 today. It brings a modern browser with much improved battery life to older, less capable hardware.

This is a win for people of average means, and it extends access to the world's information to people in developing countries that wouldn't have had the opportunity on more expensive hardware. Would we be where we are today without Android?

Use the patents as a defense against patent troll attacks. But when you become a patent troll yourself, you are now the enemy.

Fuck Apple. Fuck Microsoft.

I will do everything I can to avoid their products, even if the alternatives aren't as good. They're both a net-negative for humanity.

csense• 13 years ago

Most HNers develop software on Mac

I've never owned a Mac, and the last time I used one was in 2004.

ideal development platform

The other day I wanted to apply the hqx filtering algorithm to some images, with proper handling of transparency. The code I found for this [1] uses the DeVIL image library. After some apt-cache searching, I found that I could do this:

    sudo apt-get install libdevil-dev libdevil1c2

I challenge you to compile this program on a Mac. Not as easy, is it?

they don't care about what Apple does

I certainly do! Due to the fact that you have to pay a non-refundable fee to the App store and it's hit-or-miss whether your app gets accepted or stays accepted, I've decided to develop mobile apps exclusively for Android.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/hqx/

abecedarius• 13 years ago

I stopped buying Macs a few years ago. I'm happy with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and apparently there are some nice newer machines too.

Iftheshoefits2• 13 years ago

I guess you may have a point. The recent spate of postings regarding the HealthCare.gov website, which contain numerous comments about the front-end website and proceed to conflate that with development of the entire system lead me to believe a solid percentage of HNers live in a "all development is web development" bubble.

Really until I moved to the Valley I had never really seen people I'd consider "hackers" or "programmers" writing code on anything other than a linux or unix terminal, or in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or some other IDE on Windows. I was actually shocked to see Apple products be so ubiquitous in programmer circles.

Outside of the "web development is all development" monoculture parts of the Valley there is a wide world of software development and developer communities who would basically laugh at the notion that Mac is an "ideal development platform" (some would guffaw at the notion that it's even an adequate one) for anything other than the Apple App Store ecosystem (where it isn't really ideal so much as mandatory, if one wishes to not break laws).

I'd make this conjecture: the vast majority of software development, in the Valley or otherwise, isn't done on Macs; it's really a very small subset of developers who prefer it, and that subset consists mainly of web app and iOS mobile app developers. If the majority of HNers develop software on Apple products, all that means is that HN's primary developer demographic is a tiny subset of the overall industry.

regal• 13 years ago

The bigger outrage in smart phones is the fact that Android exists in the first place - thanks to a little industrial espionage on Apple's board. [1]

I know where my wallet voting's going.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/robenderle/2011/11/11/you-the-ju...

37prime7• 13 years ago

I am Secretary Not Sure if I could read anything by Rob Enderle.

Please find a better, umm more reliable source.

kumarm2• 13 years ago

Everything in first iPhone existing much before iPhone came into existence if you lived outside Steve Jobs distortion field.

The fact that Apple could sue Motorola who invented Mobile Phone and get away with it shows how stupid the patent system is.

hoverbear• 13 years ago

Your source is terribly written (grammar and spelling mistakes abound) and is blatantly bias towards Apple.

pedalpete5• 13 years ago

Actually, Apple was really dumb in this instance. Google bought Android in 2005, Apple brought Eric Schmidt onto it's board in 2006. So, either Apple was hoping to get some insight into what Google was doing with Android and hoping Schmidt might slip up, or they just shouldn't have brought an advisor on who was the CEO of a potentially major competitor. I was always amazed that that happened.

Google Buys Android - 2005 http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-08-16/google-buys-a...

Schmidt Joins Board - 2006 http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric...

serge2k2• 13 years ago

but the screen on my new macbook is so nice :(

Besides, google isn't exactly a wonderful company lately. Their ads and related policies, ugh.

waqf6• 13 years ago

Have you seen the screen on the Chromebook Pixel?

alextingle2• 13 years ago

Really? I thought all Apple monitors had horrible glossy surfaces.

realcul3• 13 years ago

Well to be fair then it should include google/motorola as well in the boycott... their hands are not clean either. Motorola has lawsuit against Microsoft/Apple on standards essential patents. folks should go buy fireOS phone/develop for it etc...looks like they are the only clean ones of the bunch.

richtr• 13 years ago

This inspired me to create a 'buycott' that people can join to show their dissatisfaction with these patent trolling tactics:

http://buycott.com/campaign/699/boycott-rockstar-s-weaponiza...

beautybasics• 13 years ago

- They are just accruing debt with their actions

- Their time will come and when it does it will be painful.

- Any system that's inherently corrupt is bound to collapse.

jmhain• 13 years ago

Any system that's inherently corrupt is bound to collapse.

I don't really believe this, but it'd make me very happy if you could prove me wrong.

prawn• 13 years ago

"Google bid for the patents, but didn't get them. Instead, they went to a group of competitors—Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony—operating under the name "Rockstar Bidco.""

I feel like with those initials, they could've operated as "REAMS" instead. From Wiktionary, ream: "(slang, vulgar) To sexually penetrate in a rough and painful way..."

beedogs• 13 years ago

I really wish they'd just nullify any patent granted that involves "doing something commonplace ON THE INTERNET!!!", as if adding a tcp/ip connection is something truly inventive or novel. Christ, this is getting out of hand.

mythz4• 13 years ago

What really sucks is how established multi-billion dollar companies are able to oppress smaller innovative ones from competing by simply using their cash war-chest to buy-up broad patent mine-fields around them. It especially sucks this is being done to stifle the momentum of one of the highest-growth markets the world has ever seen.

Patents were meant to protect the innovator, instead software patents are being used to legally harm competition they can't compete against technically - hurting everyone except the status-quo.

chroem• 13 years ago

It's not just software patents, it's all patents. The current 3D printing technologies making a big splash right now were all invented in the 80's. The patent minefield just beginning to expire is what's causing the 3D printing boom.

waqf6• 13 years ago

citation?

bsdetector• 13 years ago

Small companies that have done something new aren't buried six feet under a lawsuit, they are bought out and become Google YouTube, or Google Maps, or Google Blogger.

Yes they may be forced to sell or sell for less to avoid patent lawsuits against them, but they sell for more than if they didn't have any patents themselves.

It isn't an idea situation, but patents still generate a ton of income for small inventors.

Goronmon2• 13 years ago

It isn't an idea situation, but patents still generate a ton of income for small inventors.

But is this income generated for a good reason or just because ..."patents"? Are these small companies getting paid because of the good work they've done or because they've managed to fake enough to get some patents useful in a war-chest of patents for a larger company down the road?

37prime7• 13 years ago

Frank Shaw of Microsoft revealed that Google was invited to jointly bid Nortel’s Patent Portfolio but declined.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/03/microsoft-just-kicked-googl... http://technologizer.com/2011/08/04/google-shows-how-not-to-...

Take everything with at least a boulder of salt before turning to an emotional being.

randomfool• 13 years ago

By invitation, was it "Join us in suing others, or we'll sue you?"

grej7• 13 years ago

indeed. Sounds more like extorted than invited at first glance.

mortale• 13 years ago

That is microsoft's story, however if I recall correctly, if google were to have bid with the others, the deal was structured such that they couldn't protect android partners. So the lawsuits against android would happen anyway with the difference being google sponsoring the patent trolling against its own android OEMs.

But yeah, "invited".

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

Wow, what a dog move. The fact they're using Google's attempt to bid for the patents originally against them is even worse. If this isn't justification for serious patent reform, I don't know what is. The fact the consortium that owns the patents is comprised of Google's main competitors in many spaces should immediately ring alarm bells for any judge. This move surely must be anti-competitive, I hope Google fights this all of the way to the top (they've got enough cash).

randomhunt• 13 years ago

The fact they're using Google's attempt to bid for the patents originally against them is even worse

That's just lawyering 101...it's a very common thing to do to try and add "weight" to your arguments is to say the opposition was aware of the "value"

grej7• 13 years ago

You have to wonder what Microsoft's goal is here, given that some estimates have them earning over $3B/yr in licensing fees on Android sales.

mayhew• 13 years ago

Locking people into their mobile ecosystem is probably worth way more then that in the long term. That's what these companies are all about, after all.

eggged• 13 years ago

Newegg can help...contact our legal counsel... don't feed patent trolls...http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crushe...

guelo• 13 years ago

In a just world Apple and Microsoft lose out on enough idealistic brilliant engineers over this that over time they decline and die.

pg3• 13 years ago

It's a little early to say for sure, but I predict this will do more to hurt Apple's reputation in the tech community than anything they've done before. And that is not a good community to alienate. I would not be surprised if they look back on this move one day and feel that they ended up net worse off as a result.

Apple used to be careful not to alienate hackers. And Microsoft has been gradually digging itself out of a hole in that respect for several years. Now in my mind they are both the enemy.

pinaceae2• 13 years ago

Google threw the gauntlet when it took a billion dollar investment into a mobile OS and gave it away for free.

these dumping tactics ruined the market for licensed OS like Windows.

did anybody truly believe the rest of the software industry would take it up the ass from google without fighting back?

bing, apple maps, patents, etc - all part of the war. how much money does MS already make off android due to lost patents?

blaming a single player in this game is ridiculous. schmidt in apple's board was the ultimate insult.

pedalpete5• 13 years ago

It's called strategy, and from Google's standpoint, it's a brilliant one. Seems to be working very well for them, while keeping competitors at bay.

With regards to Schmidt on Apple's board, you're not the first to mention it here, as I responded to another comment, Apple was really dumb in this instance. Google bought Android in 2005, Apple brought Eric Schmidt onto it's board in 2006. So, either Apple was hoping to get some insight into what Google was doing with Android and hoping Schmidt might slip up, or they just shouldn't have brought an advisor on who was the CEO of a potentially major competitor. I was always amazed that that happened. Google Buys Android - 2005 http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-08-16/google-buys-a.... Schmidt Joins Board - 2006 http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric....

haberman• 13 years ago

Apple threw down the gauntlet when they made it clear that their devices would be a walled garden where they would have absolute control over what apps you can run.

Prior to Android, your choice was between your carrier overlords and the Apple overlord. Not only was that limiting for users, it was a vulnerability for Google business-wise to have their direct competitors as gatekeepers between their services and their users.

cromwellian10• 13 years ago

How dare they! And how dare Linus Torvalds "dump" Linux on the industry, or Mozilla "dump" Firefox. They should be required by law to charge high fees!

smsm422• 13 years ago

They are really evil people. Probably as evil as those who created OSes, languages, browsers, protocols, libraries, compilers, IDEs - and gave them away for free. If not for the "rest of the software industry", everything would be in ruins now due to evil commies that dare to give away software.

mythz4• 13 years ago

Exactly which part of investing billions of dollars acquiring and developing a technology and giving it away for free, lowering the price of consumer devices, needs to be prevented?

If they've discovered a business model that enables them to invest, develop and freely distribute their own tech to end-users benefits, they should encouraged, not a victim of established cartels using their cash war-chest to buy B.S. patents that they can use as anti-competitive weapons to legally attack their competitors instead of competing against them technically in the market-place.

derleth• 13 years ago

Google threw the gauntlet when it took a billion dollar investment into a mobile OS and gave it away for free.

Seeing as how MS sold Xbox consoles at a loss so they could sell expensive games, I doubt MS has much of a leg to stand on with this claim. Apparently, the Xbox One is the first Xbox to be sold at a profit or break-even from day one; this was such a bold move that Forbes devoted a whole column to it: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/06/microsoft...

(Other articles indicate that most consoles are sold at a loss. I'm picking on MS because it was mentioned in the article as a party to this suit.)

__david__• 13 years ago

That may be true, but it would be misplaced. I think we should channel our outrage into changing the screwy US patent system so this kind of stuff would become moot.

pedalpete5• 13 years ago

Why can't we do both? Let the companies know we don't accept their behaviour, and try to change the patent system. The patent system won't change overnight, but the companies can drop the suit in an instance.

realcul3• 13 years ago

yes. definitely agree..no one company (including Google) is truly altruistic here..as I said below if anyone we should be rooting for fireOS and not Android/Google.

hetman• 13 years ago

Because until the entities, likely to exert huge lobbying pressure on legislation, are brought to heel, changing those laws will prove very difficult indeed.

bad_user9• 13 years ago

No. Voting with your wallet works. We need to start treating companies like they are members of our society - if one of your neighbours turns out to be a jackass to your other neighbours, do you tolerate him just because, hey, he just wants to make a profit?

Fuck that. Companies must learn to play nice and it's insane to treat them differently than we treat people. It's a huge double standard and if you expect the system will change without us punishing companies with our wallet, then you've got another thing coming.

threeseed3• 13 years ago

Google's continued abuse of the FRAND process has done nothing to hurt their image in the eyes of most. And likewise this suit won't affect Apple or Microsoft's reputation one iota.

pedalpete5• 13 years ago

Can you expand on this? I'm not sure what you mean about Google's abuse of FRAND.

cromwellian10• 13 years ago

That's because most hackers perceive Google's FRAND suits as a justified defensive counter-attack brought on by Microsoft and Apple's patent abuse, so they are given slack.

fpgeek7• 13 years ago

By dragging out negotiations for years and then trying to use the courts to establish a ceiling (but not a floor) on FRAND licensing costs, I think Apple has done more to undermine FRAND. They've developed a "heads I win, tails you lose" playbook.

Remember, Motorola has been talking to Apple about licensing their FRAND patents since 2007. Over six years later, what do they have to show for it? I bet plenty of companies will start thinking that FRAND and royalty-free aren't all that different.

curiousDog• 13 years ago

I'm now ashamed I ever worked at Microsoft and I'm assuming a lot of devs there will feel the same way :(

infocollector• 13 years ago

Is working at Google and Apple any different?

fpgeek7• 13 years ago

I agree that this will hurt Apple's reputation, but, in my opinion, this should already have been "priced in". Apple never really repented after the "look-and-feel" lawsuit. Many hackers just didn't notice because they were an underdog climbing out of a deep hole for so long.

Now that the worm has turned and Apple has their do-over we can see that they never changed their spots. They just improved their legal tactics.

partyanimal• 13 years ago

"The Rockstar consortium is an organization backed by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson and Sony."

bane2• 13 years ago

Apple "priced in" their legal retainers into the impressive profitability of their products.

yamamoto• 13 years ago

hurt Apple's reputation in the tech community than anything they've done before

They're not the ones suing Google. Rockstar's a separate entity with its own corp leadership that has incentives to find ways to recoup their investment.

Apple used to be careful not to alienate hackers.

Google and their monopolistic practices and their anti-competition ploys is what has alienated more hackers than Apple ever will.

Now in my mind they are both the enemy.

The only enemy is Google. They completely disregard intellectual property of others and attack everyone else's revenue streams by offering free products and refuse to pay IP licenses for anything.

Google's the most evil corporation today and it's sad that you, of all people, don't see it. Look closer Paul… they're the big brother everyone warned us about!

mythz4• 13 years ago

They're not the ones suing Google. Rockstar's a separate entity..

You must be new here to not know the scammy tactics Patent trolls use to hide behind and operate within.

But judging from your newly created account, I'm going with just another standard shill.

fastball• 13 years ago

offering free products

By my definition, that makes Google the good guys.

x0x0• 13 years ago

but say I want a smartphone, what is my alternative?

google, who works harder and harder to sell everything I do to advertisers (now you can't even rate apps w/o a google+ account), and who just shut off transmitting search data so they can screw site owners for more $?

microsoft, who is a party to this and actively worked to make the internet worse (and succeeded!) for the better part of a decade?

or apple, who at least isn't run by and for advertisers?

all choices suck

WaterSponge2• 13 years ago

Marketing is a natural occurrence. All companies/people/groups market themselves in one way or another. Your not exactly forced to buy into whats being sold. Why is everyone so stuck on google core being a marketing company?

I think its the least of evil profit motivations since hell I might actually be interested in what google has figured out I may want... Vs being locked out without any options and force into dealing with a certain player.

rednukleus• 13 years ago

Buy an Android, and if you are worried about Google's targeted ads, then don't link it to a Google account. Or put Ubuntu or FirefoxOS on there.

There may not be a perfect option out there with no tradeoffs, but there are options that are far far worse for the industry than others.

zurn• 13 years ago

Firefox OS and Jolla.

Firefox OS + ZTE Open: cheap and good battery life (70€ / $80, 2-7 days).

bad_user9• 13 years ago

People bitch and moan about Gmail serving ads and yet people bitched and moaned when Google Apps dropped the free version, even though with paid accounts you don't get ads anymore and the pricing of Google Apps is insanely good compared to the alternatives.

Android, Chrome, Chrome OS are open-source. Amazon already forked Android. Android is also the only popular mobile operating-system that allows installation of software from third-party sources. And if you use Android, you don't have to buy into Google's services.

In my eyes it doesn't matter that Apple isn't being "run for" advertisers. Because Apple sure as hell isn't operating their business in my interests either.

Joeri3• 13 years ago

Microsoft earns $10 per android handset, they make more from android than windows phone. So regardless of whether you buy windows phone or android you're paying microsoft. Apple and microsoft have a long-standing patent sharing arrangement, so they don't pay each other money. So, you can pay apple or pay microsoft to get access to a smartphone. Given the amount of patents they hold, any smartphone os is either flying under their radar or in their sights. If firefox or ubuntu succeed with their phone OS, they will get sued.

The problem is not these companies, it's the regulatory climate. Until we defang technology patents it will remain like this, with only a few tollkeepers who own the market.

grey-area2• 13 years ago

but say I want a smartphone, what is my alternative?

I agree all mainstream choices suck, but there are alternatives: FirefoxOS or Ubuntu Phone

chris_wot• 13 years ago

How did Microsoft make the Internet worse?

asadotzler• 13 years ago

Mozilla is working on your alternative with Firefox OS. We're still very early but there is no doubt in my mind that Firefox OS is going to do to the smartphone market what Firefox did for the browser market, get vendors fighting over users and developers by improving the user and developer experiences and opportunities.

We need a real competitor here with a completely different kind of agenda and, IMO, Mozilla is the competitor to do that. (Yes, I work for Mozilla on Firefox OS, but I'm not just spouting off. It took us a while to get from Mozilla in 1998 to Firefox but we did it and it fixed the browser market. We're getting into phones for the same reason and you can help us fix this market by joining the Mozilla Firefox OS project.)

shin_lao• 13 years ago

I don't think this is how things will turn out.

People will like Google less and less because you can't do anything without them and there is no alternative, and what will happen to Google is exactly what happened to Microsoft: antitrust lawsuits, patents lawsuits, etc.

This is not because Google is "evil" or anything, just because they are #1 and therefore are target for more and more people.

In the end, this is all for the better because this may help alternatives to emerge as it helped alternatives to Microsoft to emerge.

cloudwalking2• 13 years ago

But Android is the alternative to the Apple hegemony. You can't get an iPhone for $50 in Asia, but you can get a $50 Android phone.

mtgx3• 13 years ago

Apple and Microsoft and joining to sue Google with FRAND patents, that they bought from other companies, and people will like Google less because of it?

Is that how the patent system is supposed to work, or are Apple and Microsoft abusing it to the extreme?

muyuu• 13 years ago

I'm not too sure. People have very short memories and attention spans. Companies are callous one day and in a few weeks most people cannot even remember about it.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

This may be true, but let's not get fooled into thinking that because "they" are the enemy, Google must be our friend.

Google is playing a very dubious game here, and it has nothing to do with being on "our" side of the patent issue. They've tried to buy the same patents, refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all, and then knowingly violated those patents.

All through this, they've been silent about their motives, and have even tried to mislead the public by claiming they were never invited to join.

There are no "good guys" in this conflict, no sides any of us should be on.

midko2• 13 years ago

"very dubious game"

Quite a statement especially on the background of the other companies involved. Any substantial arguments for that? Until recently, Google had not filed even a single patent lawsuit [1] and so far still has not done so against Apple, MS, and the like, afaik. Meanwhile, the 'rockstars' have been going rampant [2].

[1] http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/02/google-files-first-patent...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_wars

air6• 13 years ago

I think separating good guys and bad guys is pretty simple, if one is against (at least software) patents:

Using patents aggressively makes you a bad guy.

Google has not done this, Microsoft and Apple have.

abrahamsen• 13 years ago

That is a blatant lie. The Google blog post from the time is available here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-a...

Google is explicit about why they wanted the patents, and why joining the consortium would not further that goal.

mtgx3• 13 years ago

refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all

Source? you're not confusing these with the Novell patents, are you?

Either way, this is the worst case of patent trolling, and may even raise anti-trust issues. Speaking of which, weren't they specifically told not to sue and gang up on other companies when they bought these?

zimbatm• 13 years ago

They've tried to buy the same patents, refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all, and then knowingly violated those patents.

That's a very misleading claim. It's not because they decided to buy a big pool of patents that they necessarily knew that 7 of them would apply to their tech. Moreover it's not clear either that they implemented anything after the fact. Those patents seem to be touching fundamental things like advertisement and search.

keypusher2• 13 years ago

Google wanted these patents so that they would not be used aggressively against them. Google has no history of using patents against other companies aggressively. I'm on the side of the company that isn't using software patents to sue other companies, which in this case is Google. This isn't nearly as complicated as you are making it out to be.

ZeroGravitas2• 13 years ago

By "refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all", do you mean that Microsoft offered to buy these patents jointly with Google, in such a way that Microsoft would be able to use them to extort Android manufacturers and Google wouldn't be able to use the patents to help defend them?

Because if so that's some pretty heavy spin you're putting on it.

edit: excerpt from Google's official response, linked elsewhere in this thread (note it was in reference to a different bundle of patents).

" If you think about it, it's obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft's objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn't fall for it.

Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forcing Microsoft to sell the patents it bought and demanding that the winning group (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, EMC) give a license to the open-source community, changes the DoJ said were “necessary to protect competition and innovation in the open source software community.” This only reaffirms our point: Our competitors are waging a patent war on Android and working together to keep us from getting patents that would help balance the scales."

abraxasz• 13 years ago

Completely agree with you, that's why I think this whole mess is wonderful news. I like the nuclear war analogy here, and I hope that both sides will hurt each other so bad in this little game that at the end they'll sit down somewhere and say: "never again". Then they'll start doing what all of us expect the Tech Giants to do: start pouring money on patent laws policies to put trolls out of business. It will have taken a lot of wasted money and harm to each of them to reach that point, but better late than never, eh.

zanny• 13 years ago

then knowingly violated those patents

I can't compile hello world in any language without violating dozens of patents.

pg3• 13 years ago

I'm sure Google didn't try to buy the patents to do this with them.

deathchill• 13 years ago

Google was invited to join in the group with Apple, Microsoft and the others? Any links or anything I could check out? I tried googling but there's too much about this particular case to find anything useful! I was under the impression that they were never offered to join in.

Thanks!

chongli2• 13 years ago

There are no "good guys" in this conflict, no sides any of us should be on.

You're mistaken. It is we, the public, that are the good guys. Whatever Google's motives are does not matter. What matters is the outcome and how that impacts the public and the future of innovation.

Right now, it is pretty clear to many observers that the system is broken and having a very negative impact on innovation, competition and the public. The legal and R&D costs associated with patents are inevitably passed on to the public.

kazagistar4• 13 years ago

From the perspective of "trivial software patents are bullshit", violating software patents does not in any way make you a "bad guy".

Furthermore, google is actively lobbying to weaken software patents.

I would say, then, that in this case, they are certainly my ally, or at the very least, the enemy of my enemy.

bane2• 13 years ago

Yet hackers will continue to vote with their wallets, buying Apple products and perpetuating this continuous pattern of bad behavior.

Of course the pragmatic alternative, Microsoft, isn't exactly know for being the good behaving kid on the block either.

And mucking around with home-built PCs running some Linux distro doesn't have the same appeal to me it had 10 years ago.

So what to do?

subsection1h2• 13 years ago

  > mucking around with home-built PCs running some Linux distro

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

weland• 13 years ago

And mucking around with home-built PCs running some Linux distro doesn't have the same appeal to me it had 10 years ago.

We're not ten years ago, you don't need to do that anymore. There are enough reputable vendors selling PCs with excellent Linux support.

snowwrestler2• 13 years ago

I choose to not care so much, based on who the parties are.

There is more to life than whether one giant company is suing another giant company. I would care a lot more if Apple used their patents to squash small competitors, but they don't. This is purely a clash of the titans.

I use Apple computers because they are the best computers for me to get my job done. Patent suits don't change that. I use Google search for the same reason.

keypusher2• 13 years ago

Just like Apple's ridiculous $1 billion patent lawsuit against Samsung hurt their reputation? Oh wait, it didn't hurt them at all and it's already forgotten. You are giving the tech community way too much credit if you think they really care about this, and the average person won't even notice.

ubercore• 13 years ago

I think it might be a bit early to draw that conclusion. Whether by coincidence or not, it did coincide with Samsung's rise as the biggest rival to iPhones. Granted other Android manufacturers around the same time started to compete head to head as well, I think that even if that case isn't at the forefront of people's mind, it was a brick in the wall.

It's important to remember how unassailable Apple felt before that. Any kink in their armor hurts them, and that was a big one.

paulsilver• 13 years ago

I know two non-techies who bought Samsung Android phones when they upgraded rather than iPhones because of that trial. Not a huge effect and obviously anecdotal, but these things do have an effect.

However, I think developers are likely to stay with Apple as they have solidly adopted their products over the last 7-8 years, and weirdly many people seem willing to forgive a large company anything, just because they happen to have purchased some of their product range.

erikb2• 13 years ago

Interesting that people can have such a different view on the same information. Since the first iPhone came on the market I always read articles that Apple would be alienating the hacker community. It also makes sense because they are mostly bought by hipsters who don't know as much about tech as they want to make others believe. I have no experience with Apple products, though. Therefore my information might be completely wrong.

cs7022• 13 years ago

I'm unhappy with Apple and Microsoft too, but the real enemy is a broken patent system that creates the perverse incentives that motivate companies to launch lawsuits like this one, to the detriment of society.

Regardless of who wins, we have already lost, because we have a patent system that discourages innovation and competition in software!

Maybe the prospect of patent Armageddon will finally force lawmakers to address the issue head on. I'm hopeful. As Winston Churchill supposedly said, "you can always count on Americans to do the right thing -- after they've tried everything else."

PS. I highly recommend Gary Reback's 2002 article, "Patently Absurd," which accurately depicts how patents are used by large corporations: http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044_print.html

Edits: grammar and style; also, added PS and qualified quote with "supposedly," because it's unclear if Churchill ever actually said those words (thanks icebraining and drabiega for pointing that out).

icebraining• 13 years ago

Actually, he probably didn't: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternatives...

I like the saying anyway, though, however said it.

drabiega• 13 years ago

The patent system isn't a person or group. It's a weapon of mass rent-seeking built in part by these same companies so that they can reap huge profits without having to actually compete with their rivals. Responsibility for this situation is squarely on the shoulders of these companies and others who have lobbied the patent system into what it is today.

Also, and this is a minor quibble, despite it's frequent attribution to him, there is no evidence that Sir Winston actually ever said that.

Datsundere• 13 years ago

Don't blame the patent system. While it is true that patent system should be reformed/eliminated, those companies chose to take advantage of it.

Just because you can steal something when nobody is looking doesn't mean it's justified to be stolen.

wmeredith2• 13 years ago

This is the logical equivalent of, "don't hate the player, hate the game." And it holds about as much water. If any company in the world has the warchest to bow out of petty patent politics, it's Apple.

Arjuna• 13 years ago

This whole story brings on such a lugubrious feeling. I mean, I guess we can chalk it up to human nature, but, patent system aside:

How did we ever arrive at the place where we believe that everyone else must lose in order for someone to win? How did we get to a point where we believe that we have to take from someone else's plate when there's more than enough to go around? How did we lose the vision that bringing the highest performance, service, features and functionality is "The Right Way" to deliver and compete, instead of destroying ourselves? How did we become so misguided that, even with a broken patent system, we are not intelligent enough and civil enough to simply do "The Right Thing?"

None of this activity is in the spirit of the Hacker Ethos, regardless of the broken system. At what point did we lose our bearing?

I'm reminded of Joshua's observation from WarGames:

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

Sigh...

pg3• 13 years ago

It's certainly true that the patent system is broken. But the fact you can get away with doing something due to broken laws doesn't make it ok to do it.

akavel• 13 years ago

If patent system was OK, with their power and money they could always find another weapon if what they really want is to attack a competitor. That said, I don't want to mean that the system is OK, obviously, this weapon surely looks too powerful.

kazagistar4• 13 years ago

Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people.

Apple does not have to participate in this. They chose to cause they anti-competative to the bone.

peterashford• 13 years ago

While I agree that the US Patent System is broken for allowing this, Microsoft and Apple have to wear the moral blame for following this course of action.

sigzero3• 13 years ago

I doubt it will do any such thing to either company. The article states that Rockstar is acting independently and regardless of any promises that the consortium made (which includes Apple and Microsoft) that they are moving forward.

debian69• 13 years ago

I love the way it was a group of 6 or 7 tech companies who bought the patents but you choose to single out apple. Was there a reason for this in particular ?

robotcookies• 13 years ago

I love how people are so defensive about this patent suit because Apple is behind it. Any other tech company doing this without Apple would have been mercilessly attacked.

gibwell7• 13 years ago

With all due respect, they are already suffering as if they had done this, so I think they have little to lose by actually doing it.

jaegerpicker2• 13 years ago

It's disgusting to me. I'm a bit of an Apple fan boy and i have a ton invested in the iOS/Mac ecosystem but this really pushes me further away. I'm really close to switching to Android and linux because of issues like this. Sure there are worse things a company can do but I have a real issue supporting a company that behaves in this manner.

jcromartie2• 13 years ago

Let's do it. I'm in the same boat... long-time OS X user and iOS dev. But I am not putting up with it anymore. OS X has been enough of a headache for development that I am ready to move to Linux for that alone, but this is just icing on the cake. They are actively pushing me away.

jcromartie2• 13 years ago

If you make software, you are likely in the exact same position as Google. There's no reason Apple couldn't sue you with the same broad patents. And while it's obviously unlikely that they will sue you, the fact that they did sue their competitor over these over-broad patents should deeply trouble you.

maerF0x0• 13 years ago

It was enough to seal my intentions to never buy an apple product again. And FTR I have a mac book air, and 2 ipods (touch, music) ... Never again.

snowwrestler2• 13 years ago

This is a clash of the titans. I think most techies will react according to which companies they are fans of.

If Apple were deploying their patents to squash small competitors or startups, I'd feel differently, but they're not.

lmm2• 13 years ago

Apple has been hostile to hackers for my entire lifetime. From suing makers of mac-compatible hardware, through refusing to license their iPod DRM to other sellers, and the unprecedented closedness of the iPhone walled garden, to the ludicrous design patent lawsuit against Samsung. They've always been the enemy of anyone who was paying attention, and this latest move is no worse than what they've done before. I'd like to believe the tech community will turn against them, but the history just doesn't support this.

Steko2• 13 years ago

"ludicrous design patent lawsuit against Samsung"

You mean the one Google's lawyers told Samsung infringed on Apple's design? Right, ludicrous.

sethbannon• 13 years ago

Despicable. At least this is good news for patent reform.

jrockway• 13 years ago

At least the US and USSR realized what Mutually Assured Destruction actually meant. It seems these big companies don't quite understand, and it's going to be pretty sad when they find out.

alexeisadeski33• 13 years ago

There is no mutually assured destruction here. Google is helpless.

adventured3• 13 years ago

$56 billion in cash. They're anything but helpless.

A $6 billion bid for RIM would solve the problem.

They also have Motorola's massive patent hoard, with thousands of patents available to assault both Microsoft and Apple. So far Google has mostly played nice on patents.

jemeshsu3• 13 years ago

Easy people, don't waste your emotional energy. Microsoft has been collecting Android licensing fee for years now. Apple has the objective to kill Androids. And you think Google don't use patent to sue? These companies are all evils.

ericd• 13 years ago

I believe Google has only used patents defensively. At least that's what I've heard their official position is, and I haven't heard anyone call them out for violating it.

afsina• 13 years ago

So far Google has not been used patents offensively. That is quite a big difference.

vincie• 13 years ago

Non-Americans watching this - make sure you organize however you can to stop the American disease spreading to your country. Watch your politicians carefully for any sign that they might want to implement their patent systems in your country. Good luck.

alexeisadeski33• 13 years ago

Disgusting.

nu2ycombinator• 13 years ago

It is simple Microsoft and Apple are trying to get their paid 4.5Billion dollars from Google. It is a strategic mistake from Google side deciding not to be part of that team to buy the patents from Nortel.

Ygg24• 13 years ago

Right. Right. Because Google suing their OEMs as part of "Rockstar" group is sooo much better. Really helps building the trust of Android.

MSFT/AAPL and the rest made a strategic decision to win those patents and destroy Android. They gave Google a choice:

A) Don't take patent - get opened for lawsuits

B) Take patent - lose trust because we are going to sue the shit out of Android OEMs

C) Buy all patent for an overinflated price

I just hope Google gets a team and invalidates all those patents, but I fear large patent price tag came for a reason.

m0nastic• 13 years ago

Are technology companies eventually going to become like cell phone companies (or oil companies) where everyone sort of agrees that they all suck, but "oh well, what are you going to do", or will some company become the de-facto "conscientious choice"?

I feel like there's at least a bunch of "companies" on the software side of the equation who I don't feel shitty about supporting, but I think the problem will be with hardware.

nutanc• 13 years ago

#IgnoreLaughFightWin, we are now at the fight stage for Android and you know what comes next

interpol_p• 13 years ago

This article is very emotionally loaded. Containing a lot of phrases designed to evoke an emotional response: 'Nuclear', 'DEFCON 1', 'Attack', 'Shocking'.

It actually doesn't mention what Rockstar is suing Google for (i.e., whether it's monetary compensation, banning the sale of products, etc.) The article seems designed to get fans of these companies to react.

I think this will play out as a much more boring, lengthy, and anti-climactic fashion than this article implies.

axman66• 13 years ago

But OH MY GOD it's APPLE and MICROSOFT, didn't you see that? It's literally the devil incorporate trying to DESTROY GOOGLE who have NEVER done anything wrong ever!!! How dare they use the law to their own advantage! and besides, APPLE have never invented anything at all and stole it all from Google even before Google released it!

Ygg24• 13 years ago

You are making guilt relative. Stop that.

It's like saying. Person A murdered person B, but person B did something shady in the past (maybe murder, maybe he stole a dishwasher or maybe he was jaywalking), so it's all Ok for B to get murdered. He had it coming.

Patent racketing is always bad. I don't care who gets fucked over by patent racket, even if it was the Devil himself, the snake from Eden, he still needs a fair trial.

linuxhansl• 13 years ago

Somebody please show me a single patent on software or a so called business-process that is worth anything (i.e. not obvious to somebody skilled in the art).

Just one... I'll shut up then.

Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, now they are doing the opposite (at least for software and business processes) and causing billions of wasted dollars and fat bonuses for patent lawyers.

This move seems a bit desperate to me. To avoid fair competition on products, MSFT and Apple are using patents that they did not even invent. Pathetic and despicable.

cheald3• 13 years ago

I'd like to second and amplify this comment. I've been searching for a single example of a software patent having ever been used to protect and promote innovation, rather than to just stifle competition or extort money from people who happen to build a successful business.

If someone can provide a single instance of a software patent being used as a vehicle for promoting the arts and sciences, advancing the state of technology, or providing a means for a small inventor to bring a product to market that otherwise would not have been viable without the patent, I would be enormously grateful.

BrandonY• 13 years ago

The RSA patent, 4,405,829, was pretty innovative and also quite useful, although even it had been invented in secret a year earlier by the British.

That said, I don't think there's any evidence that the existence of the patent system prompted its invention, and so I wouldn't call this an argument in favor of patents.

WildUtah• 13 years ago

Just one good non-obvious software patent?

US Pat #4,200,770 Diffie Hellman public key exchange

There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of good software patents out of the 500,000 or so that have been issued.

We'd all be much better off without any software patents at all but it's not true that they are all fraudulent and abusive like the ones in these lawsuits. A small fraction are decent. Of course the innovations involved in those few patents would all have been discovered and published without patents as an incentive, because that's how software works.

rst• 13 years ago

Also, in the same sphere, RSA.

But the rationale for the patent system is to encourage innovation that wouldn't have happened without it, and it isn't clear that either of the public-key crypto patents qualifies. In each case, the inventors included academics (Hellman was on Stanford's faculty) whose job is to innovate and disclose their own innovations. (And while it's common these days for academics to patent and try to monetize at the same time, that wasn't always so. It was rarer, and sometimes controversial, in the 1970s.)

The RSA patent made R, S, and A very rich --- but it isn't clear what it did for the rest of us.

smegel• 13 years ago

a "navigation tool for graphical user interface," describes a way of navigating through electronic documents. Another describes an "Internet protocol filter," and a third patent describes an "integrated message center."

Sigh. Where are my anti-depressants.

caf• 13 years ago

"Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

Well, that's pretty damning. If it's true, then it indicates that the patents never should have issued in the first place. If the overwhelming majority of "Anyone out there" managed to independently re-invent these alleged "inventions" without reference to the patent, then that seems to point out that whatever inventive step may have been involved was obvious.

yajoe• 13 years ago

Looks like Rockstar will be this generation's SCO. It's almost exactly the same tactic as last time, except now Microsoft isn't even bothering to hide its role.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies

zmmmmm3• 13 years ago

It will be interesting to see how this goes now that it is (essentially) an all-American battle. The Samsung / Apple suit was always complicated by suspicions about the jury, partly (but not only) because it seemed impossible for a US jury to take an unbiased view of a trial between such an emblematic American company and a foreign corporation. This one will be a much different contest and perhaps we have a better chance of seeing a real examination of the underlying patent issues occur.

tariqr• 13 years ago

Sony, Microsoft, Ericsson, Apple and RIM. So basically, SMEAR.

firstOrder• 13 years ago

As someone wrote a century ago - "Monopoly, it inevitably engenders a tendency of stagnation and decay...the motive cause of technical and, consequently, of all other progress disappears to a certain extent and, further, the economic possibility arises of deliberately retarding technical progress. For instance, in America, a certain Owens invented a machine which revolutionised the manufacture of bottles. The German bottle-manufacturing cartel purchased Owens's patent, but pigeon-holed it, refrained from utilising it."

confluence• 13 years ago

Haha, when you have to sue your competitors to stop them from totally crushing you in business, it's game over, you have already lost.

To be honest patents don't protect shit and their only value is in protecting oneself from pointless litigation by losers. The only way to protect your margins from attack by the competition is to have a naturally defensible product that derives it's value from the very nature of its use. Google search is naturally defensible. No one has their code (NDAs FTW!), and no one has the cash or the competence to build the computing infrastructure to serve that code. Microsoft Office/Windows was naturally defensible thanks to the network effects generated by third party applications on the platform, until the Internet/Linux destroyed that by being cheaper and faster. The iLine of products from Apple was naturally defensible for the same reasons as Windows, until Android ate their lunch, just like Windows ate Apple's lunch back in the 1980s. Apple also cried like a bunch of babies way back then and sued Microsoft for eating their lunch using GUI patents.

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

-- Mark Twain

If you're in the tech world you’re mantra should be: innovate don't litigate.

Apple and Microsoft, you have just shown that you'd rather litigate than innovate.

Whenever that happens in the tech world that means that you are done.

timedoctor• 13 years ago

I think the ultimate outcome of this type of patent war is either: a) Re-examining the whole patent system to prevent this sort of attack b) Companies will have to re-locate to China or another country where US patents do not apply

It's totally ridiculous to be sued for offering free software.

r0h1n• 13 years ago

At the risk of downvotes & personal dissonance (I love Android and Google search), I'd like to posit an alternate filter to apply to this news.

Given (a) Google's inexorable rise and domination of more and more parts of the Internet & mobile [0], and (b) the unwillingness or inability of regulators around the world to apply any kind of checks to its scary clout, could this - Rockstar - be a kind of defensive mechanism from the industry itself?

I'm not saying that Apple, Microsoft, RIM etc. are suing Google out of a greater sense of responsibility towards consumer choice, but can we not - as external observers - view their action as a countermeasure to one competitor's overwhelming clout?

[0] http://blog.launch.co/blog/googlewinseverything-part-1.html

WaterSponge2• 13 years ago

We are all building software on the shoulders of giants but like to claim major pieces of glory once we grow into corporations. Remove a certain piece and like jenga it all falls down.

Some pieces protected by patents. Others patentable but never claimed.

tracker1• 13 years ago

I would think that 4.4 billion could effectively fund congressional campaigns in a number of key districts.. which may be more effective use of said funds for Google at this point. If I were Google, I'd be funding an all out war on technology patents.

OoTheNigerian2• 13 years ago

Anytime I see the latest "outrage" on HN, I laugh and remember us, citizens of my country that want to protest as long as they are not required to personally sacrifice too much.

Most of these companies depend on you hackers (I do not write code) to be successful. If you decide to pull your apps from the app store, stop buying their products and write a post telling everyone why you made the move, they will be hurt. Even if the embargo is for one year only!

But of course that will not happen. No one likes to be inconvenienced personally. It will mean loosing revenue. Other people (the EFF)should fight the battle. You donate your $10 to EFF and believe you have fought the good fight.

Nothing will come out of this. Google will band with a few chaps on the other side (Facebook Twitter etc), a few hundreds of millions will be spent on lawyers and they will settle in one way or the other. After all, they are working together on other schemes (just like the politicians).

Of course, Facebook will one day eliminate all privacy settings, or Google will put ads in our inbox and there will be outrage again.

Of course nothing will come out of it.

I try to limit my outrage these days. I suggest you should too.

antocv2• 13 years ago

i agree and sympathise with your comment.

however it is enough if a small minority takes action and great things can happen even then. for example gnu and linux.

ive not seen many people who can be inconvienienced and use linux freedom software all the time. but ive seen some. they have made a change, not yet visible for the masses but its there.

its those few who take the first steps. i think you should too. do it. even if its only you.

i did that many years ago and couldnt be happier now.

fauigerzigerk4• 13 years ago

I disagree completely. Protesting against these things (i.e participating in the latest outrage on HN and elsewhere) without sacrificing your entire livelihood is exactly the right thing to do.

Being cynical about these things is what changes nothing, or rather it changes things for the worse. In countries where everyone is resigned into the idea that every government official is always going to be corrupt and every company will always be criminal are usually very poor.

This isn't a war that is won or lost in the short term. We're all in this for long haul, we have to live with it and still try to move the balance in the right direction.

bnegreve• 13 years ago

Protesting against these things [..] without sacrificing your entire livelihood

If you invest your time and money into say, an iPhone application, you're heavily supporting the Apple store. Once you've done that, the fact that you've expressed your disagreement with Apple policies on online forums is more or less irrelevant.

Look at Facebook: there is a rather large number of people complaining about their privacy policies, yet they keep making them worst every year. That's because people complain, but don't quit.

bad_user9• 13 years ago

Of course, Facebook will one day eliminate all privacy settings, or Google will put ads in our inbox and there will be outrage again.

As I was explaining in another comment, if you or other people or other companies don't like something, they can always build something better. If that something is good and provides more value to some people than the popular alternative, then it will take off. That's how the free market works, that's how Android became popular.

Patents lawsuits on the other hand are a loophole of capitalism, preventing the emergence of competition. I haven't been worried in a long time that Windows is still king of desktop operating systems, because Windows is no longer relevant because of technological disruption. I'm not worried if Facebook eliminates all forms of privacy controls, as teenagers are already preferring other platforms precisely because of privacy issues (e.g. who wants their grandma to see their drunk-at-party photos?). But what if Facebook will acquire enough patents as to nuke all alternative social networks?

Now that's a reason to worry. And this outrage is entirely justified. I also don't like your apathy and your cynicism. All the freedoms and luxuries you enjoy today come either from technological disruption, or from people that were outraged and that decided to do something about it. I also don't understand your position on this matter - if you agree that patents are bad, then your cynicism does nothing else but to waist other people's time.

OoTheNigerian2• 13 years ago

All the freedoms and luxuries you enjoy today come either from technological disruption, or from people that were outraged and that decided to do something about it.

"Decided to do something about it"

I am against "outrage" for outrage sake. If you are outraged but not willing to do anything about it, then it is worse than ambivalence. You are wasting energy and reducing the value of outrage as a deterrent.

Outrage would be a useful if it resulted in action. So anytime there is outrage, the offending party would retrace their steps. Because they would be aware "shit is about to go down!"

So if the first time Twitter/Facebook/Apple indiscriminately fucked over developers, out rage resulted in something that affected them, things would have been different today.

I also don't understand your position on this matter. if you agree that patents are bad, then your cynicism does nothing else but to waist(sic) other people's time

I am against the abuse of patents and this is an abuse of patents. I am hoping my "cynical post" will offend hackers (who have leverage) enough to say "how dare you say I am all talk!" and take action.

dzink• 13 years ago

This is a survival tactic for the consortium. If you look at the bunch - all of them have hardware businesses with margins that are getting continuously eroded by Google's "free by ads and cheap manufacturing" model. If they don't make it expensive for Google to erode mobile margins, they won't last long in that market. The 0.01 Billion in bidding difference they got the patents with is quite suspicious too.

The real pickle stems from all of the money feeding the patent trolling business. That industry needs to die a quick death, and instead it is getting fed by the buckets. Who knows where it will spill to next (killing fledgeling hardware/internet of things firms?).

jmpeax• 13 years ago

The real villains aren't the companies involved in battles of fisticuffs, they are the corrupt or incompetent politicians who fail to abolish software patents.

bad_user9• 13 years ago

What I don't understand is why in the world are companies allowed to buy patents in the first place? At the very least, patents should NOT be transferable.

How is it acceptable for companies with big pockets to simply buy 6,000 patents and then sue the shit out of whomever they don't like?

I mean, to some degree, I accept that patents in the health-care industry are helping, because research labs spend years and enormous amount of money on research, with results that can be easily copied. And so they need the first mover advantage in bringing the product they researched on the market. It's not perfect, but at least it has some economical and moral ground.

But how in the world is it acceptable for patents to be transferred, like they are assets? If you weren't the one doing the research, then you shouldn't be the one that benefits from a government-granted monopoly, no matter how much money you have.

Myrmornis• 13 years ago

Know nothing about this. But say they couldn't be transferred. Then you could have moribund companies holding a patent and doing nothing with it thus stopping other people from doing something that would benefit the world. But given that they can be transferred, there is a market, so a moribund company has an incentive to pass the patent on, and the patented thing gets realized, by someone.

adventured3• 13 years ago

If the Obama DOJ has any guts, they'll break out the collusion section of anti-trust law and make some new anti-trust case law regarding multi-company patent offensives and the potential to cause harm to consumers.

tluyben2• 13 years ago

Like many have said already; how do you vote with a wallet when there is not so much choice. I need a new laptop; my macbook, after many (by apple and by myself) repairs, is falling apart. It's fast enough, but just broken. So I was going to get the 13 inch retina, but now I'm rethinking my position. But what is the alternative... I haven't seen much yet. I want long battery life, i7 4th gen, 13 inch and at least retina resolution. So Pixel, Ativ 9 pro, Yoga 2 pro, ... ? But I also don't want Windows; I don't want to pay for it. Problem... I know the thinkpad t440s has long battery life, i7 4th gen, linux can be installed(still pay for windows), but the resolution (& GPU) are simply too depressing.

The tablet + phone. Firefox phone; I'll get one of those. Tablet? Are there any which you can buy now?

I really would just like to see Ubuntu on everything; tablet, phone and laptop, but I guess that's not really an option. I say Ubuntu because it's the most obvious; when Ubuntu is on there I know I can replace it with another Linux and I can customize it at least.

Like someone said; we cry here, but we all buy macbooks anyway. While a lot of us have the power to actually change things. If 100.000 people ask Lenovo for a Linux laptop, it'll probably come. Besides MS pressure (which is probably 100% of the reason) I wouldn't see why they wouldn't all offer the choice. It's just not popular enough; check any video on any startup site on HN: everyone has macbooks.

hect0r• 13 years ago

It would be interesting to see what would happen if Microsoft/Apple moved beyond Google to target IBM.

CmonDev3• 13 years ago

Well, it is lawful - just like Google's tax evasion.

DanBC• 13 years ago

minor point: evasion is not legal, avoidance is legal. So, Google does tax avoidance, not tax evasion.

And Google has lawyers and accountants telling them that what they're doing is legal, but if the UK tax authorities disagree it goes to a court. So it's possible that what Google is doing isn't legal, because it hasn't been tested in court.

CmonDev3• 13 years ago

Thank you for clarifying.

CmonDev3• 13 years ago

Well, perhaps in the spirit of knowledge sharing and to set an example Google could share their full search algorithm?

josteink2• 13 years ago

OK. So does this once and for all end the debate about Apple being a proper patent-troll, or do they need to buy a bridge first?

Fuxy• 13 years ago

Anybody else seeing Google suing Microsoft and Apple directly in the future or is it just me?

This is battle stations and given Google doesn't use shell companies they either make one or declare all out war.

hristiank• 13 years ago

"The Rockstar consortium is an organization backed by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson and Sony."

Out of all these companies RIM (BlackBerry) is the only one up for "sale".

How long until Google tries to buy itself a backdoor into the alliance?

I give them a couple of months.

FridayWithJohn• 13 years ago

I'm busy reading "The Masters of Doom". Here is a little snippet all about patents with one of the world's best developers of all time, John Carmack. "Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect his own financial interests, but in reality he had struck what was an increasingly raw nerve for the young, idealistic programmer. It was one of the few things that could truly make him angry. It was ingrained in his bones since his first reading of the Hacker Ethic."

As a developer there is nothing more destructive than to be be told you can't do that... it is similar to what I did.

Could you imagine what would happen if someone put a patient on breathing?

tehabe• 13 years ago

The problem is not if Google or Apple, Microsoft & Co. are good or evil. This patent war is evil, very evil. Because it could prevent companies like Jolla, Canonical or Mozilla to release their smart phone OS world wide.

Especially small companies won't have a chance in a patent battle against a Apple, Microsoft or Google proxy.

That is the biggest problem, and the solution has to be political, it won't be reached in the courts or on the market but in parliament.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

These patents are just "adverts, but on the internet" right? Exactly the sort of stuff that shouldn't have been granted a Patent in the first place.

I hope google has the guts to use the "invalid patent" argument in court and rule this sort of nonsense invalid in future.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

"Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

If "pretty much anyone out there" is breaking a law, that tells us there's something wrong with the law.

michaelfeathers• 13 years ago

Maybe the problem with patents is that they are transferrable property. What if patents were seen more as a license from the government to an inventor for a period of exclusivity? That would prevent the worst of this sort of stockpiling and weaponization.

josteink2• 13 years ago

"Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

And that's the single best reason provided to end software patents once and for all.

When everyone is "infringing" without even knowing it, without reading the patent or without trying to copy someone else's work, you should stop, take a step back, think about things, and realize the entire system is fundamentally broken.

Or if you have no soul, file a lawsuit and hope to make lots of free monies.

kriro• 13 years ago

I wonder how hard Canonical will get hit eventually if Ubunut Phone ever comes close to being viable.

But most importantly: lol software patents.

The twisted part in me hopes every single startup will get sued for all the amazing one-click patents and whatnot that they infringe upon as soon as they secure their first round of financing at some point. Maybe then something will change but I doubt it.

tits_for_tots• 13 years ago

I don't know why Google doesn't just license these patents, it's pretty critical to their business. They obviously thought so when they were bidding billions of dollars for them.

erikb2• 13 years ago

Great article!

Just as a side note: Because English is not my mother tongue I have problems to understand what the title actually wants to say, though. To me it sounds like Apple owns Microsoft, and Microsoft is Apple's "rockstar" because it sues Google. So I wonder if some mother tongue speakers could verify that the title is actually understandable to them and explain what the title wants to say. Thanks!

ithinkso• 13 years ago

Oh you americans and your silly patents

veganarchocap• 13 years ago

It seems to be these declining, nonreactive old-timers that seem to stay in authority by handing out court cases over arbitrary points.

They're not protecting 'their material', they're stiffing innovation.

ypcx• 13 years ago

So is it finally less expensive for Google to pay a lobbyist firm (hell, pay ALL the lobbyist firms) to significantly overhaul the patent law?

fpp• 13 years ago

The key word in the title is nuclear - a war that no one can win

emhart• 13 years ago

There is something mildly sickening and darkly amusing that Microsoft and Apple apparently learned enough losing over half a billion dollars in patent lawsuits filed by McKool Smith, to then hire them when they were ready to go after their competitors with patent suits.

BenoitEssiambre• 13 years ago

This is nothing less than an attack on technology, innovation and engineering. They could try to compete by building better products and matching the level of openness of their competitor but they'd rather keep their platform closed so they can gouge their customers and use lawyers against anybody that doesn't.

We live in a world where inventors can't build anything that get's them noticed by large established competitors without risking frivolous patent lawsuits on obvious concepts.

existencebox• 13 years ago

As an engineer, I'm repulsed by the whole deal, to the point of feeling sick about it.

I'm going to get a lot of negative posts about hyperbole, but no, I legitimately get red in the face and get a headache whenever I think too hard about the patent wars. It is our fucking JOB to build things, to move technology forward, that is at least, my entire reason for being what I am.

so in my eyes at least; fuck the patent system; fuck the american built system for repressing innovation for "corporate protections." We all argue about whether it's a "better or worse" solution but at this point, when I spend 99% of my time hearing about the billions spent on suppressing innovation rather than supporting it, it makes me realize I want little to no part in the system that motivates this.

I will have no part of it. My code will be open. I will build things that I care about, and give them to the world, and hopefully work at a place that repays me for that (as I have found now.) Consider this my very ill-placed manifesto to in my own endeavors, support innovation, not the ill-gotten-gains of the future holder of my patents.

(I'm not sure if I put this here to get it out there; or for comments; or for thoughts; I think mostly I just feel that it needs to be said, although perhaps unnecessarily alongside an ocean of similar replies :P)

padrikas• 13 years ago

It looks to me that it is really a wrong system when you can buy patents only to sue someone in the future. And it rarely benefits people who create stuff If you could buy patents only to use them (but the ownership of a patent would not be transferable) there would be no patent trolls

transfire• 13 years ago

I am surprise. There seems to be a lot of Google haters here. Tell me, would you be happier in a world without Google and Android?

EGreg• 13 years ago

I am shocked that Google's "ads in search" business was patented before Google was founded, and no one ever asserted this patent. Bill Gross' overture said they never patented it.

Imagine for a second that Google will have to turn over a portion of the ads revenue from the past 10 years? It makes up 97% of their revenue...

wmeredith2• 13 years ago

"Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

Isn't that the definition of a broken system of selection?

swat535• 13 years ago

It would be naïve to think they wouldn't do this. Google would do it if they were in the same position. This is mostly a problem with the law, the fact that such a thing is possible is a problem.

Also, pretty much all these companies were invited to join Rockstar to buy the patents, including Google: http://www.techradar.com/... . Except Google decided that they wanted it all for themselves and went against the group, in the end they lost. The only reason to hold these patents are to basically sue other companies, the fact that Google bid against the group over and over again implies that if Google had gotten these patents they would have done exactly the same. So lets not pretend Google is a victim.

bramswenson• 13 years ago

Just keep overpaying for "pretty" hardware and a mediocre development environment and see where it gets us folks. Apple is just as bad as M$ ever was, they just have more style.

clavalle• 13 years ago

If your patents are obvious enough that 'everybody is infringing', your patent should not have been issued.

PeterisP• 13 years ago

I'm happy for patent war to go nuclear. It desperately needs reform and neutering; and if lawsuits like these can motivate some big-tech companies like, say, Google to start lobbying seriously for patent reform then this exactly what the world needs.

And by lobbying seriously I don't mean a couple of million that were spent on some other activities - if such companies are eager to spend amount such as 4 billion or 12 billion on purchases that include zero benefit to their products&customers, but simply as patent war ammunition&defense; then I'd expect that they can easily spend hundreds of millions in campaign contributions to extuinguish the patent war as such.

We don't need bigcorps accumulating frivolous patents to ensure mutually assured destruction - it doesn't work that well as a deterrant, and it is used against smaller corporations. We need disarmament.

emehrkay• 13 years ago

It this not business as usual? Not saying it is "right," but not saying that it is out of the norm. It seems to be an issue now that people(consumers, nerds, etc.) have emotional connections to these companies

gesman• 13 years ago

This is a chance for Obama to do the right thing to boost innovation and economy.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

My Apple fanboy friends always try to argue how Apple's hardware and software are superior, as if that'll convince me that I should buy Apple gear.

I keep explaining the same thing: I know Apple makes the best stuff. I don't avoid Apple because of quality considerations. I avoid Apple because they're screwing up the industry, an industry I use for both my career and my hobbies.

throwawaykf4• 13 years ago

Allow me to inject some perspective.

1) For all the talk of Microsoft and Apple "abusing patents", it was actually Google that had to pay 14 million in damages for actually doing just that. Let's just not forget that before deciding who should be "alienating the tech community". However, Google's PR really is very good, and unfortunately, most people here accept it without critical thought because it confirms their biases.

2) This is business, and business is war. Giving away Android for free was a direct attack on Microsoft's and Apple's business model. They are simply responding in kind. Most people here root for Google simply because they give away tons of really cool stuff for free, and/or because they seem to be "more aligned" with free/open source, which appears to be the dominant religion 'round these parts. However, people elsewhere would see this as perfectly natural.

3) Google is very weak on the patent front, and they know it. So while they hustle to buy up patents from all sorts of sources, they simultaneously try to spin the patent system as "broken" and their own moves as "defensive" in an attempt to reduce their disadvantage in the long term. It may seem counter-intuitive: why simultaneously buy patents and work to weaken their value? Because buying patents is just a short term defensive move. In the long term, Google would be perfectly happy to not have a patent system at all because all their competitive advantage is locked away in their data centers. This is a luxury Apple and Microsoft do not have. They put out products that anyone anywhere can copy, so they would prefer having a patent system.

4) As mentioned below, Google had an option of joining the consortium, but decided to go it alone. Drummond's blog post says it would not have helped Android, but that is very shallow reasoning. They could have always joined in and negotiated the rights to indemnify Android vendors in exchange for contributing a lot more towards the winning bid. Maybe the consortium would not have agreed to it -- we'll never know, because Google peremptorily declined to join in. But I have no idea why they though they could outbid a consortium of multiple giants in the space.

5) As mentioned in TFA, there is some truth to the argument that Rockstar is actually independent of Microsoft and Apple. I know of patent trolls that have funding from e.g. hedge funds, but operate entirely independently. Heck, IV is a perfectly good example. They have funding from Google themselves, and yet they turned around and sued Motorola!

Now, allow me to address your theory: You posit that this may invoke the ire of the "tech community" and this would be a disadvantage to Apple and Microsoft. Some questionable assumptions:

1) The tech community in general has a similar world view as the HN (or is it SV?) bubble. Trust me on this, HN is an enormous echo chamber. If you ask software engineers outside this bubble -- which is, you know, most of the world -- about patents, you'll get three responses:

a) "What's a patent?" (No, really.)

b) "I don't mind patents."

c) "Having a patent as an achievement!"

2) The tech community, even if it does by some remote chance share your world view, won't care. This is business as usual, and has historically always been so.

Now you may move the goal posts and say that by "tech community" you mean "the good ones", the "hackers". Again, I'm not so sure. Consider the NSA revelations: All the comments on HN are rife with outrage. Yet would you believe, even for a minute, that the NSA does not have the best of the best?

Edit: I really do not wish to come across as supporting one company over another, and hope to maintain a neutral tone. I think all the companies involved are perfectly good companies to work for, and perfectly justified in what they're doing. I'm just trying to present a perspective that is somewhat lacking in most comments so far.

kbenson2• 13 years ago

I don't know how you can expect to keep a neutral tone when equating this to war. That is striking an incendiary tone from the beginning.

Releasing Android was not an "attack". It was entering a market with a competitive product. The fact that Google was able to leverage new methods and resources (open source and the continued evolving of the Linux kernel) to reduce the cost of their offering (to the point of changing where revenue is generated in the product) is a normal market behavior. Pooling monopolistic grants and abusing the legal system to thwart market behavior is not something I think we should condone, regardless of how much the other companies felt under attack.

throwawaykf4• 13 years ago

The comparison to war was simply a rhetoric device to imply that all is fair in love and war.

Releasing Android was not an "attack". It was entering a market with a competitive product. The fact that Google was able to leverage new methods and resources (open source and the continued evolving of the Linux kernel) to reduce the cost of their offering (to the point of changing where revenue is generated in the product) is a normal market behavior.

That's one perspective. See my response to the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657912) to see another perspective. Google was not the first to think of using Linux for a mobile OS (See: Maemo). But think of where the real competitive advantage for Android came from: Now can you now think why Apple is unhappy?

* Pooling monopolistic grants and abusing the legal system to thwart market behavior is not something I think we should condone, regardless of how much the other companies felt under attack.*

"Monopolistic grants" is just a biased way to look at the patent system that most of the other tech industry works with just fine. "Abusing the legal system"? Again, let's just keep in mind it was not Apple or Microsoft, but Google which was found by a federal jury to be doing so, and charged millions of dollars for that.

Google did whatever they thought they could get away with legally to get an advantage. These companies are simply doing the same.

kumarm2• 13 years ago

[ Giving away Android for free was a direct attack on Microsoft's and Apple's business model. They are simply responding in kind.]

So Google Entered a new Market with good product and different business model, MSFT and AAPL responded with litigation. Thanks for making it obvious.

throwawaykf4• 13 years ago

No. Apple created a new Market at great risk and expense, and Google entered a it with a rip-off product. On the other hand Microsoft sacrificed three years to create an original product to compete fairly. But since Google didn't incur the risk and costs of creating said market and designing an original product, Google (supported by its search monopoly profits) could undercut them by dumping on to the market Android for free. And so Apple and Microsoft responded by suing for trampling on their intellectual property rights.

But wait, there's more! It doesn't end at Apple and Microsoft! Google also ripped off Sun by co-opting, without license, the Java dev environment (that cost Sun millions of dev dollars) and more importantly, the Java work force (that cost Sun billions of marketing dollars), just so they could get more people to make apps for their mobile OS. Guess what! Sun/Oracle sued them too!

Wow, if all these companies are suing Google for ripping them off (and considering multiple patent-related injunctions issued against Android vendors), it must mean Google has been ripping them off!

See? I can spin facts to support arbitrary biases as well.

Now, let's drop the incendiary language that most posters here stoop to. Here's the (overly simplified) reality: Google took for free what they thought they could get legally away with (and their gambles have so far paid off), and their competitors responded by trying to restrict them by using other legal counter-measures. Each side is doing exactly what they can get away with legally. People just happen to side with Google because their actions agree with their personal biases.

throwawaykf4• 13 years ago

Ugh, just realized... this was supposed to be a reply to pg's top-rated comment but I ended up posting it as a separate thread. As such, the second half appears completely out of context.

wfunction• 13 years ago

I'm extremely surprised no one's mentioned the timing of the whole thing -- right before the Innovation Act.

mcherm• 13 years ago

I hope that they manage to ban the import and sale of ALL Android phones, iPhones, and Windows phones simultaneously.

I'm not sure what else might actually motivate Congress to change the law.

neovive• 13 years ago

Android has really been a source of innovation over the past few years. I would hate to see things take a step back. I recall a couple years ago, when Google had to remove the integrated search feature from Android -- that searched both local and online -- due to some IP infringement.

Fundlab• 13 years ago

If patents are granted to drive innovation, how is Rockstar encouraging that in this case?

usefulcat• 13 years ago

The patent system probably added more value 200 years ago when the dissemination of knowledge was not nearly as easy or cheap as it is today. The reason for this, of course, is technology.

Looking at this situation from a very meta- perspective, I find it fascinating that what's effectively happening is that the patent system is seeking to undermine the very technological forces that have made it less relevant. Almost like watching two different species compete against each other in nature.

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

This should make HP's WebOS patent sale more competitive.

josephlord• 13 years ago

I'm going to hold judgement until I understand the size of licensing fees being requested (and if there is a separate FRAND rate for any Standards Essential Patents).

Google bid $4.4Bn for this portfolio so they must have see value and/or danger in these patents. I disagree with the article's statement that "Google has plenty of patents" as this doesn't seem to the case in the current battles with Apple and Microsoft. The Motorola purchase doesn't seem to have helped much in this area either.

ChrisNorstrom• 13 years ago

??? They spent 4.5 billion on patents rather than invest in their own products. For all they know the patent system can completely change in the next 5 years, outlawing the kind of crap they're pulling right now.

mydpy• 13 years ago

We need to treat the cause and not the symptom. Because really, if Google won this suit, they would most likely be trying the same tactics.

LVB• 13 years ago

At my last job, 15 years ago, I was granted four patents. I also got a fancy engraved plaque for each one. I've since moved, and those plaques sit in unpacked boxes. My wife has occasionally pressed me to hang then up like I used to, when we both saw them as a point of pride. I have trouble explaining to her why they're an embarrassment to me now, and that I'm not showing them off.

I'll be happy when I see they've expired.

nullc4• 13 years ago

If you're aware of anyone being strong-armed with your patents you could make amends with your conscience by offering to consult with them to help them workaround or invalidate them.

locusm• 13 years ago

How does one keep up with new comments in a thread like this, wheres the sort by date?

acd• 13 years ago

I think software patents sucks! Software patents is a way for big corporations to keep smaller agile competitors off their turf creating monopolies & oligopolies.

1010011010• 13 years ago

Microsoft and Apple are assholes.

NicoJuicy• 13 years ago

It's quite easy, in the days, it was Apple vs the rest, and Apple got popular (Mac vs PC, ...)

Now, its Google versus the rest, we'll see how this goes :)

Fizzadar• 13 years ago

It's such a sad sight to see companies pour billions into damaging each other (and themselves) rather than innovating and creating new things.

belgianguy• 13 years ago

For me this feels like it's the famed "Thermonuclear option" Steve Jobs alluded to: two of the biggest tech giants and their ilk conspiring to KO a competitor in one of the most cowardly ways possible. As one shouldn't make the assumption that Rockstar is looking to compete, Rockstar is looking to defeat. This all feels like instead of studying harder you pay off the schoolyard bully to go beat up that kid you don't like because he gets better grades than you do.

Rockstar is not just a patent troll, it's the Patent Troll King. It's much larger, and has vastly more financial backing, most notably from Apple and Microsoft. It's nearly invincible (as it can't be counter-sued). Plus the case is filed in Eastern Texas, known to side with patent holders. Both companies have much cash in their coffers, and both are feeling the heat from Android. For Apple, the high-end Android devices eat into their margins. While Apple still is very profitable, Android's break-neck pace forces them to come up with their own new features or risk looking dated, coupled with Android's often better-specced phones that are cheaper than the iPhone. Although brand loyalty is shielding Apple from large shifts, it can't afford to sit still. Microsoft on the other hand, is playing catch-up in Mobile after missing the boat miserably, and while the focus should be on making their own products better, they largely seem to have been industrious in harassing Android hardware manufacturers, plus employing some questionable PR-tactics to smear its competition. They'd both be relieved to see Android wither and die.

The tactic at the heart of the battle against Android seems to be the following: increasing Android Total Cost of Ownership by drowning it in patent licenses. This in an attempt to make it toxic to any OEM or potential Android partner (as they have to pay license fees, or could be sued to oblivion if they refuse), all in a bid to make Android less attractive (vis-a-vis e.g. Windows). I don't know the might of Android/Google, nor how much strength it'll need to face off against the now teamed arsenals of both Apple and Microsoft. If Rockstar can string Android up with enough patent licenses, OEMs will bail, developers will leave and Android revenues will dry up. It'll make a Windows license look cheap and safe in comparision. Then Microsoft can return to pointing and laughing at the open-source community, sit back and let their software rot once more as they just eliminated their direct competition. They'll have some air fist-fights with Apple to seemingly 'compete'.

What more is Rockstar than a hired gun they can sic on any software outfit that might prove competitive? What if Microsoft feels that Valve's SteamBox is getting a little too much traction for their comfort, why wouldn't they just send their bully after them? What if Ubuntu can cling on to some larger marketshare when it can smoothly switch between phone and desktop software? Why shouldn't Microsoft try and hobble innovative efforts by letting Rockstar make the developers' lives a living hell? It's more than sickening that some Microsoft/Apple fans are already reacting all indignant and holier-than-thou now that their patent lackey has a Nortel patent on search, as if Google stole web-search from them all along, and they only just noticed it.

What can counter Rockstar? At what point is this hulking giant too big for the market it's trying to disrupt? What stops this beast from going after any open source project that proves slightly popular? How can a developer rest easy at night, knowing that any day a Rockstar lawyer might be knocking on his/her door, and that financial ruin lies ahead? Whether by lawyer fees after a Pyrrhic victory or after being shut down because he/she was found to infringe on something so very basic a child of five years old could have figured it out? John Vesci himself said that 'Pretty much anybody out there is infringing', meaning that any company name that gets in their sights, they can take apart.

Is that furthering the sciences? Is that what passes for innovation nowadays? As a developer, this makes me sick to my stomach. But the system allows it, and there's been too much financial profitability to get this genie back in the bottle, so the odds of reform happening before this warhead hits are slim. Even if it were to happen, it'll be thoroughly undressed and defanged before being applied to any case worth its salt.

kazagistar4• 13 years ago

"Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

In other words, the law is totally useless and needs to be modified if not totally revoked ASAP.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

I have, perhaps, some degree of sympathy for compensating people whose significant work is subsequently, directly used.

I'm about done with, "You can't do it because I did it first."

The world wants to move forward. Your outsized self-interest, simply doesn't interest me.

eonil5• 13 years ago

This is the disaster started by Google themselves. Also a reward for betraying friendly partner - especially who is not likely can take Google's business, and even attacking them using new partner.

Now Google's mates are only Samsung and telecoms which seems really not helpful on these kind of lawsuit or Google's image.

See now what's happening. Apple-Microsoft alliance against Google, Samsung and telecoms…? Am I alone feeling former team looks nicer?

Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

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