In the news yesterday we found on that google has bid $900 million US dollars for a range of 6,000 telecoms patents from Nortel covering wireless, wired and digital communication technologies.
Quoting googles blog post,
One of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services. Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories.
Many of these parents are interesting in that they relate to a whole broad spectrum of telecoms and if it is indeed purely for defensive purposes then it certainly seems like a logical acquisition, at this stage however they are just a bidder. Let’s wait and see if apple, oracle, etc decide to ruin the party.
It is a shame that companies have to take such defenses instead of there being meaningful patent reform, it’s a huge problem which does need seriously addressed. There is a huge disadvantage between the small companies and the large corporations which ultimately is holding back innovation.