So an undisclosed offer made in private does not mean much. If Microsoft had made their offer public they may use it to make a point, but as things stand now this supposed offer is best ignored.

PS: I should also note that this "we made them a generous offer and they refused" statement is a trick often used by PR people and politicians to muddy the water.

This was MSFT offering for google to talk about joining in the bidding. Google turned them down without knowing what the terms were, because the terms hadn't even been discussed. This was an offer to talk, not an offer of terms.

Google has been caught with its senior counsel telling a blatant lie, in public. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see people trying to spin it so hard...

That does not back up your claims. Humorously, the article you linked to, though confusing Novell and Nortel, clearly points out that no context is given for any prior communication (which would be necessary for evaluating your claims of "this was an offer to talk, not an offer of terms"), and gives yet another reasonable argument for why google wouldn't want to agree to a joint bid:

"The search firm might have felt bound by the terms of its "stalking horse" bid, which would let it break up any existing patent licensing terms if it won; it would never have had that option in the winning group as companies with Nortel patent licenses, like Microsoft, would have insisted on keeping them intact."

If true, it is curious that Google would refuse to join the joint bidding team, but there are many reasons to do so, some of which may not be available to the public.

(By the way, we do not know whether or not Google and Microsoft were already talking about conditions, we don’t know what those conditions were. You seem to base your assessment on information we don’t have.)

On the other hand, Google took the high road and built on their feel-good "Do No Evil" mantra. So I hold them to their words, and whenever a screw-up like this happens, where Googlers were exposed to be liars no different than others, shouldn't they be "punished" at least by their own pie in the face a bit more?

Who said that? I cannot find that in the tweet or the article.

MSFT only invited them and Google turned them down flat. So there was not negative agreement that you are clearly inventing. Obvious that would be a raw deal, thanks for assuming that it would go that way.

Just so you know, 99% of business is not done for hristov or anyone else on HN's benefit. Inter business deals are usually negotiated in private. Especially if it was a preliminary offer.

I love Frank.X.Shaw's move here (hiring him from Waggner Edstorm was one of MSFT's best moves). Google is essentially trying to spin a situation where they were invited to be a part of a bid as a anti-competitive move. I'm slightly surprised that Google didn't see this coming - Drummond must have known that any public spat would lead to MSFT digging up any email threads between the two companies, especially those which make it seem like MSFT is trying to reach out to Google.

Also, Google made the first move with this type of grievance. They have the luxury of setting the tone and ensuring that all other parties only have a chance to defend themselves rather than achieve anything greater than when this all started.

Somehow I've got the feeling everybody is going to win. Google made the patent problem very public. This spark might light the fire of a revolution.

Google wants to be secure by buying up patents and over turn the Nortel patent sale. They are just whining that they don't have a toy too.

Nobody is talking about overthrowing the patent system except for maybe people on HN. Google very seriously wants to be a player in this and have a patent portfolio. Read their blog post's last paragraph.

Everyone I know /patent lawyers included/ has said that the system is broken.

It's a cold war; everyone's got to have nukes, just in case the other guy uses them. Then some upstart like PRNK, ahem I mean /Lodsys/, comes along, lobs one into someone's applecart, and suddenly ICBMs are flying everywhere.

What we have here, gentlemen, is a mind shaft gap.

I think you misunderstood the last paragraph. They want to challenge competition by innovation not by a patent war. Google's patent portfolio is there to protect them against unfair competition.

"Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it."

TL;DR -- Do not put emotions into a business analysis.

There's a very valid point you didn't address, which is that Google is relying on its search monopoly profits to pump a free product into a new market in order to destroy existing competitors there. Regardless of how you feel about Google or Android, that is a behavior Microsoft was once criticized for when it made Internet Explorer free in order to destroy Netscape. Just something to think about.

It's important to maintain an objective perspective on all mega-corporations with monopoly power to make sure that your emotions aren't preventing you from recognizing a villain. Is Google a villain? In my opinion, they're on their way based on their behavior of the last couple of years.

The only "free" part is licensing to OEMS, and they still need to pay for R&D for making physical devices. So that part has no bearing on OS-creators who also happen to manufacture their own devices like Apple and RIM.

It sucks. It props up MS' failed mobile division by riding on the coat tails of Google. But it is how things work right now and the manufacturers are not unhappy enough with the arrangement to ditch Android just yet, so they still feel it's a good enough deal.

(aside: I agree that the philosophical differences between extortion and licensing patents is slim to non-existent but unfortunately that's just how things work right now. That may sound like hyperbole but consider the recent Lodsys lawsuits against indie devs. They honestly may as well be going around threatening to bash in knee caps. They know the small guys can't fight them but they have this crappy law on their side. I'd love for things to change.)

Until there's an example where they are using patents offensively, it's unreasonable to claim that they're planning on doing it, especially since they have repeatedly and publicly claimed that doing so is unethical.

Oh, and that's why we blame Apple/Microsoft for using the patent system in this manner. It's unethical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can someone explain please?

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

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

Microsoft's council can't be so naïve.

Edit: by refusing to participate, Google indicated that either they wanted the patents in order to be able to defend against Microsoft or that they didn't find them worth the effort. The proposal could pretty much be the way Microsoft used to measure Google's interest and intentions

"They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them;"

If Google was offered a chance to bid along with Microsoft, how is Microsoft trying to make sure Google didn't get them? While it may not have been in Google's best interest to partner with Microsoft, they can hardly argue in good faith that Microsoft is trying to withhold those patents from Google in some sort of conspiracy.

Microsoft had enough patents that it was more important Google did not have the patents for itself than for Microsoft to add to its own arsenal.

Google might have instead accused Microsoft of denying it leverage, in the face of Microsoft et al.'s mountain of existing patents, but at the time that probably seemed a verbose way of making the same point: that Android's competitors would like to kill it with patents.

(We haven't list sight of the fact that B&N, HTC, and others have been targeted for using Android, while the same can't be said for WP7 licensees, have we?)

Edited the Nortel and Novell discrepancy.

Does he expect MSFT to somehow help Google build a defensive portfolio against it?

These companies should be competing on performance and features, not with lawyers over whether a linked list is an innovation (example taken out of context, but some of these patents are no better than the multiply linked list patent covered a year ago).

If you consider android innovative, then the patent process saved google the 7+ years Apple spent developing the iPhone and allowed them to get to the market much quicker with a touch screen phone (they'd been previously working on a blackberry style OS for android.)

I am the inventor of two software patents. One of which involved solving the visual glitches that appear in online games due to the high latency of playing over a modem. This patent involved a lot of timing issues, and was pretty narrow.

However it was claimed on slashdot that we "patented the idea of online gaming!!!!"

Later, in a discussion list, they claimed we'd patented the idea of IRC!

People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

In the case of the patents I've been involved in, that is not what has happened. In fact, the portrayal of what was covered by the patent didn't match the patent at all, and it is clear that the people putting forward those patents as examples of bad patents were, frankly misrepresenting them.

Every time I've seen a bogus patent claim and actually read the patent, I've found this to be the case as well. (I don't remember the linked-list example, so haven't read that particular one.)

I'm not saying that bogus patents don't exist. I'm sure you can get things by the examiner.

But the system has a solution for this-- if your patent is bogus then it won't stand up in court. If prior art exists, then you run the risk of spending a lot of money, only to have the patent nullified when someone presents prior art. (And I mean real prior art, not the kind of stuff that people claim is prior art, like the claim that IRC is prior art for solving clock jitter in 3D online games)

The patent system, as with anything else that relies on the meager US court system, is expensive... but there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed.

Google is certainly capable, both financially and intellectually, of getting a bogus patent thrown out. There's no reason they should be calling on the federal government to intervene with a political "solution" on their behalf... unless they know that there isn't actually prior art and the patents are, in fact, legitimate.

In fact, I think googles call for reform is an admission that the patents aren't bogus after all.

Edit: I didn't change the text above, but want to clarify- I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents, though not named as an inventor (I didn't realize the significance at the time.) For the other I am the sole inventor, but it hasn't been brought forth as "bogus" in a public forum yet, though, for those who don't read it carefully, they could easily make the claim. This is why I'm being vague about the specific patents. Previous experience on Hacker News tells me that if I wasn't vague the topic would turn to how those patents are so obviously "bogus" (to people who haven't read more than the headline)... and well, frankly my name is on them. I really don't to be discriminated against in business for having a pr-intellectual property position. The current climate makes that fear seem pretty legitimate.

I am a patent lawyer specializing in patent reexamination - i.e., my day-to-day job is evaluating and invalidating patents.

There is a lot of truth to what you say that what a patent "covers" is grossly misrepresented in the technical press. There is some justification for the popular misinterpretation of claim scope, though; I can't tell you how many people discover, years later, that they have "invented" wifi - or VPNs - or any other successful standard you might care to name.

One good example of this is the RIM v. NTP case. The NTP patents were about pagers. It was later that they realized that they had "invented" email (i.e. sending electronic messages to a hand-held device). When you read the original disclosure, though, it is obvious they had no such thing in mind.

Further, you are right that most patents have more complexity than the high level summary would indicate. Does that mean that the patents are valid? No way. I personally have seen 30-40 patents that I would consider to have any valid claims after a full prior art search is done-and that is after having looked at many thousand patents. My personal kill rate on patents that I have dealt with is in the high 90th percentile.

Bonus tip: as an uncredited inventor, you have a very valuable asset-particularly if that patent is being asserted.

Perhaps add contact info to your HN profile? The community here includes people who might eventually need your services.

A question: how prominent, really, is that region of East Texas where we hear that most of these suits get filed? Does it make it significantly more difficult to do your work? I'm always shocked when I hear about that. It seems an outright corruption of the system, like the hanging judges of the past.

Edit: I see you already mentioned this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845398) but I would like to hear anything more that you have to say. Oh, and please keep posting here. You clearly know what you're talking about..

Seriously?

I can see you might say Android would not have shipped a touch-screen version if the iPhone hadn't first, but I can't see the argument that public patents helped with that much at all.

Once you've seen a multi-touch touchscreen work, it isn't hard to work out how to make a capacitive touchscreen do it.

I can't comment on whatever patents Apple may have, because I haven't read them, but the above is surely an oversimplification.

Let me describe how a typical capacitive touch sensor works. It's basically a grid of wires, one set running horizontally and the other vertically. (They aren't really wires, and the difference matters a lot for multiple reasons, but we can ignore it here.) For each wire, you can measure (kinda) whether a user's finger is near to it, and how near if so. (Because the finger will couple to it capacitively, which changes how the wire responds when you wiggle its voltage up and down.) So you use the horizontal wires to measure where the finger is vertically, and the vertical wires to measure where it is horizontally.

So far, so good. Now you want to make it work with multiple fingers. Problem 1: if you have a finger at position (3,3) and another at (10,10), what you see is (crudely) lots of coupling to wires 3 and 10 on each axis. But that is also what you'd see from a finger at (3,10) and another at (10,3). How do you tell the difference? Problem 2: if you have a finger at (3,3) and another at (3.5,10) then you can see the y-coordinates clearly enough but the signals on the x-measuring wires are going to be hard to disentangle.

These are not trivial problems to solve. (I know of a few approaches. I don't know what Apple actually do. I have worked for a company that makes capacitive position sensors, but not for Apple. Nothing I've said here is anyone's trade secret.) The more-obvious things you might do to try to solve them all have substantial difficulties. And of course these aren't the only difficulties in making a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen. (Making a decent capacitive touchscreen at all isn't trivial, though it's pretty much a solved problem nowadays.)

So this is exactly the sort of situation in which, in an ideal world with a sensible patent system, patents might be the Right Thing: there's a tricky technical problem, it's solvable but you can't just Do The Obvious Thing and have it work, so having someone find a good solution, publish it, but still be able to get commercial advantage from it seems like a pretty good outcome for everyone. (Note: this does not constitute an endorsement of how patents currently are in the real world.)

Pure software patents are, by definition, exactly equivalent to patents on ideas, expressions, really large numbers, etc. Good for you for getting a couple of patents, seriously. But if they really do cover just software, then you just patented bits of speech, literally. The patent system was never intended to cover that stuff, and you only got away it with because of insufficient guidance from the courts over the past couple decades. I believe this situation will be rectified eventually, and patents like yours will once again not be allowed.

> "... and that people are patenting really obvious ideas."

This is exactly the case in the lodsys hubub, as just one timely example. You don't have to look to hard to find many others.

> "there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed."

You're joking right? In all the discussions swirling around this issue, rarely do even the most intransigent defenders of the status-quo say that there is absolutely no need for reform. Even the most obviously bogus software patents require millions of dollars to invalidate; combined with the patent office's utter inability to properly evaluate software patents, the system is ripe for racketeering.

>People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

Patents _are_ on ideas. Sure you need to demonstrate an implementation but the patent, assuming it's been drafted at all well, will cover more than one implementation. It covers an area of implementations that fit in with the idea being protected. This is why patent claims have "fixing means" instead of "screws"/"nails"/"glue"/....

>I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents

Do you mean responsible for the invention that the claims cover or for drafting the claims? If you're responsible for the invention then you have a legal right in most jurisdictions to be named as inventor on the patent.

Finally, probably the most important point. As you say, you can sneak things past the examiner. This is in one way a bad idea because getting an invalid patent should be worthless. But here's the rub: invalid patents are worth a lot against people who don't have millions to spend on negotiations/court or don't have huge patent portfolios to bargain with.

An invalid patent could prevent a startup from entering a field unless they have funds up front to challenge the company/inventor holding the patent.

Ensuring that patents have a very high degree of validity out of the gate is vital to avoid negatively impacting innovation IMO.

How is that a result of software patents?

You made this claim yesterday as well. It is so ridiculous that I find it hard to take the rest of your comment seriously.

The iPhone most certainly showed consumer acceptance of a touchscreen. It was a consumer test that demonstrated that the lack of a physical keyboard and minimal physical buttons is acceptable if not preferable by customers. Did any patent application teach anything technical, though? That is laughable.

>People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

Most patents are on ideas.

There have been a tremendous number of misunderstandings or outright lies about patents on here-

-patents are not some great mystery only known by a few, and are overwhelmingly boilerplate. Every single independent claim stands on its own and can be infringed.

-some have posited that patents are highly specific and no one is qualified to comment on them save super experts. Any criticism of a patent will yield a "you have to look at the specific claims!". Yet here's Apple's own patent lawyers description of why HTC Android handsets violate their patent-

"the Nexus One includes Android's "Linkify" functionality, which "take[s] a piece of text and a regular expression and turns all of the regex matches in the text into clickable links. This is particularly useful for matching things like email addresses, web urls, etc. and making them actionable". That is the meat of it. The rest of the text is boilerplate expanding on the concept of "on a computer".

-patents do not need a working implementation. As others have pointed out, people have patented perpetual motion motions, among other hilarious patents.

Is this how rotten Microsoft has become? They don't even grasp what they are being accused of.

EDIT: I really wish people would reply with their opinion rather than just downvoting. Or at least do both. I thought it was an interesting observation that I haven't seen anyone make: Google complains about Microsoft's ethics and they respond with a point about strategy. Do they even understand the difference?

Further, you make two assertions here: "MS teamed up with Google's competitors to bully them with bullshit patents. "

You haven't shown that MSFT has bullied google, nor that the patents are "bullshit".

If the patents are bogus, they would be easy to dispatch in court with prior art.

this is false. Nothing is ever easy in court, and invalidating patents is especially so-by design. There is a presumption of validity that attaches by law to every issued patent. In layman's terms, that means that the deck is stacked against anyone who tries to invalidate a patent in court.

Further, validity in court is decided in two parts. The first part is when the judge - a 50 year old who did history or poli sci undergrad - "construes" the claims by deciding what they mean. This frequently leads to some marvelous interpretations of terms. At least the judge has a college education and tries to get it right.

Next, the "facts" about how the patent claims apply to the accused technology are determined by a jury. Distressingly often, this jury is in East Texas, where there are two undergraduate degrees and ten people who have ever used the Internet in the 100-person jury pool.

You think I'm kidding. Or exaggerating. I'm not.

I have often thought that I could write a legal thriller with a helping of Dan Brown-style "all the facts and cases discussed in this book are real." people are astounded when it is explained to them.

But what if they wished to grant immunity to Android manufacturers, but the group did not want them to?

Unless you are suggesting that Google didn't know why the others were bidding on patents in the first place, in which case you have to tell us why Google was bidding at all.

A lot of people are giving Google the benefit of the doubt for their motivations in bidding on the patents (hey, it's pro-Google territory around here, I get that), but the point of this article is that Google's blog post was a lie. They were trying to portray a pattern of behavior on Microsoft's part by which they team up with competitors against Google, yet it turns out Microsoft actually offered to bid with Google.

Google refused for any of a myriad of reasons which I doubt anyone here can even begin to know, nor can we begin to know what the terms of this offer were. However, seeing as MS is in fierce competition with Google and is already on the offensive in the patent war, I would not assume the offer was particularly amicable.

They were trying to portray a pattern of behavior on Microsoft's part by which they team up with competitors against Google, yet it turns out Microsoft actually offered to bid with Google.

MS did team up with competitors against Google. Possibly after offering to team up with Google, but so what? How are the two mutually exclusive? MS is a corporation, not a character in a story. They can have a dozen different interests at once, with no particular loyalties or moral consistency.

A bidding with Microsoft wouldn't make sense at all.

I'm unaware of any case of Apple suing a company for violating a patent that Apple bought. However, Apple does sue companies for violating patents on Apple's inventions. Apple is not a patent troll, they are simply protecting their inventions.

If Google had chosen to enter the bidding, the terms of the agreement could easily have included a cross-licensing deal, as these are how these things are often done.

In fact, entering the bidding with these companies would have been the cheapest and most effective way to neutralize any claim they might have had on Google over these patents.

If Google had entered the group they would have gotten a license on them (why else would google contribute to the bid?) and the cost of that would have been less than bidding for the whole thing by itself, by definition.

I think google wanted the whole thing for itself, in the case of Nortel, and lost, and is now crying foul because it didn't get its way in an auction it didn't take very seriously in the first place.

Apple's patents, like many software patents, tend to involve obvious techniques and algorithms that have been carefully obfuscated by patent lawyers.

Using such patents offensively is not so much about protecting Apple's innovations; it's more about preventing competition. This is beneficial for Apple, but bad for consumers and the overall health of the market.

Couldn't the simple explanation be "If we join forces with Microsoft and Apple to jointly buy these patents, the DoJ is going to come down on all of us for illegal anti-competitive behavior"? Why are people acting like Google did something wrong by not wanting to join the cartel that they are now publicly saying is anti-competitive and that the DoJ should impose limits on?

"Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no."

So Google may still have a point that Nortel patents were gobbled up by Apple and MSFT to strangle Android just as the Novell ones are.

Or am I misunderstanding this article?

Microsoft is pointing out that Google was offered a chance to be part of the buying group. That would have given Google access to them and precluded them being used against Google. This makes it very likely that the buying group was in fact buying the patents for defensive purposes, rather than to go after Google.

If Google refused to pony up 4.5+B and refused to share with Microsoft/Apple etc. Then it do not get those patents. That's far from the conspiracy theory its recent blog post is painting.

The claim that this is MSFT PR spin is based on the presumption that MSFT offered google bad terms, but the email makes it clear they were proposing talking about joining the group-- there were no terms yet.

Plus its pretty much impossible for there to have been bad terms. This is why competitors like Apple and RIMM can join the same group. If google wasn't going to get what they want out of the deal there would be no incentive to contribute.

Joining a group and paying a fraction of the bid is always cheaper than bidding against that same group and having to pay the whole bid.

The only reason you wouldn't want to join such a group is if you wanted to use the patents offensively.

Google could have tried to do a deal to bid and be able to indemnify anyone it wanted. Microsoft might or might not have been open to bidding on those terms, but it seems Google didn't even try.

Weird indemnity clauses are fairly common in patent deals. For example, Microsoft was already indemnified against the Nortel patents, and yet bid anyway.

They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple

These are the patents Microsoft is referring to.

Yes, the Nortel patents are possibly more dangerous and the prime motivation for their blog post, but Google called out Microsoft on this set of Novel patents, and one cannot blame them for responding.

I'm not sure that removing anonymity from bidders is a good thing or not. I mean, if you know who the other bidders are, that would affect your strategy, removing some purity from the auction process, wouldn't it?

But, maybe you feel I'm sidestepping your real issue, so let me make another point: In any situation where companies might collude like this, they're effectively creating a cartel. Say, in the case of the employee salaries that you mention.

The problem with a cartel is that there is always an incentive for a member of the cartel to violate the agreement. For instance, if MSFT, Apple, Facebook and Google agreed to cap software developer salaries, then Google (or one of the others) has an incentive to secretly violate that agreement to get the best employees, right?

Pretty soon the cartel falls apart, or the agreement has no effect. The stronger the agreement, the more incentive there is to violate it.

Further, imagine if they were successful and kept salaries below a market rate-- this would give a huge boost to any of their competitors who were willing to pay market rates, right?

They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot by doing so, driving the best employees to other companies.

This is why cartels don't really work, or at least aren't sustainable for very long.

I think that 'instead of' should be a 'As well as'.

well, how does buying novel/nortel patents protect your innovation? how does joining with MSFT to keep patents away from GOOG protect your innovation?

Maybe I'm missing the point, or it's not fair to think that Nortel vs Novell makes a difference. I really have no idea. I'm just wondering aloud. I don't really get how this is all perceived in a legal sense or in terms of how this affects Google's statement today. I get it's relevancy, but does it make Google's position less tenable? Maybe I'm just naive because they support the position I was already in favor of.

edit: I guess my other post which is more speculative would be the response to "they also mentioned Novell in the post".

They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them.

We’re encouraged that the Department of Justice forced the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms

They made it about the Novell AND Nortel patents. In some regards they need both to show a pattern of collusion. Rather they have a situation where THEY turned down Microsoft to go it alone. Makes their case a lot weaker.

    > We’re encouraged that the Department of Justice forced the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms

Since Google refused to bid along and the CPTN and Rockstar groups won, Google isn't able to use those patents to defend against Microsoft. Microsoft won.

Had another group won the auctions, the result would be neutral to both Google and Microsoft. Both would, probably, be bullied.

The only scenario where Google would win would be if they offered the winning bid or joined a winning group with no ties to Microsoft. They would then be able to use those patents against Microsoft.

And don't forget Apple's patent portfolio threatens Google and its partners too.

Google played this tactically horribly. First, their first goal should have been to get these patents off the table. For example, for the Novell patents, MS wanted them so that Apple and Google couldn't sue them with it. But part of the deal was that MS immediately sold those patents to Attachmate. They own none of the Novell patents now (although they have a perpetual license to their use). So clearly MS wasn't planning on being offensive with the patents. It was purely a defensive play.

Second, by not joining in the bidding Google overplayed how much they are worried about these patents and other patents held by the members of the consortium. Things like that are what drives up prices. And it's like blood in water. Companies can smell when they know you have a weakness.

Google should have just taken these patents off the table, and then continue to fight their current battles.

Now they have their current battles to fight. AND they have 882 Novell patents that they can be hit with. Then 6000 Nortel patents. Whoever is running Google's IP planning I think needs to be replaced.

Simply going in together on patents isn't collusion. Intel and Google were together on the final run for the Nortel patents. Google bought 1,000 patents from IBM just a week or so later. Google has no problem sharing patents.

The "implied" collusion was that the patents would be used against Google. This clearly isn't the case if they were asked to be part of the fold.

Everyone arguing against Google is conveniently forgetting that Google has only been sued by Oracle over Android. All the other suits are against individual manufacturers. This is about Apple and Microsoft colluding against HTC, Motorola, etc. to force them to license Microsoft software. This is not just about Apple and Microsoft colluding against Google.

The only way I could see Apple and Microsoft doing a joint bid with Google is if they retained the ability to sue other players using these patents. So until I see a clear offer of terms, it seems pretty obvious Google was not rejecting a good-faith offer from Apple and Microsoft. They were rejecting a situation where Google would help Apple and Microsoft buy up patents to use against manufacturers that ship Android.

The way the patent worked w/o Google was that each party got a 100% perpetual license to use the patents. That is Android would be in the clear on the patents. They would also get a set of patents equal to x% of the patents. So you'd have a set of patents you could assert against anyone you wanted, except those in the deal.

So Android manufacturers would have been in the clear for everything Google produced. BUT, for example, skins on top of Android could still be attacked. And of course so could the HW.

Google should have went in on the deal and pushed stock Android to the phone manufacturers. Sure it hurts differentiation, but today the skins suck anyways, and it would reduce their patent surface (although clearly there are patents MS and Apple have that are outside of these deals).

Okay, we're not talking about a patent, we're talking about a patent licensing agreement, which I don't think either of us have read. And I doubt that it would have given Android users/manufacturers bulletproof protection.

"They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them;..."

It seems imminent that Apple will benefit from Android via Samsung, and Microsoft is already from Android via HTC, Motorola. Is it possible that Google did try to buy them to secure Android. If they had such a large set of patents, wouldn't that have given them and their hardware partners significant leverage against Apple and/or Microsoft? It seems like a defensive pattern.

Is it possible that Android's success will feed Google's competitors who've joined together to ensure their ability to leach off of Android via patents? Doesn't that make Google's interests fundamentally juxtaposed from Apple/Microsoft's who will profit simply from patent imbalances?

I found Google's position on this to be especially lame.

"These were worth only 1 billion, and they sold for nearly 5 times that!", omitting that Google bid "nearly" 4 times that. (Where "nearly" is defined as rounding up.) Why is four times "expected worth" okay, but 5 times isn't okay? Because they lost.

Of course it was a planned move, it's not like a guy wakes up in the morning and calls a significant competitor to offer a joint bid on a billion+ patent trove while buttering his toasts.

> And it worked.

The only way for it not to work would be if Google had won their bids. As long as MSFT's joint bid got the prize they got out happy. Google tried to play a hard game, and they blew it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2842683

When there's a reply this pointed to a story that popular -- I'd expect it to make front page.

Their biggest asset all these years was being the default OS on the majority of PCs sold in the USA and around most of the world.

As other free options catchup and become much, much more robust this decade (and already most portable non-x86 devices ship without the need for ANYTHING from Microsoft) they become irrelevant. Lawsuits and patent royalties will be all they have left by 2020.

Your original post was almost completely unrelated to the story at hand. It would be more appropriate in the original Google blog post thread, but even there not really appropriate. It's more fitting a story about the future of Microsoft.

I think the downvotes were meant to say, "you're off topic". Post about how MS's response wasn't credible or legit or whatever. But talking about their OS position over the past 2 decades is really kind of left field.

(and this comes from someone who has been around before windows and www, and used Microsoft products almost exclusively back then, including compilers)