hn_decay

A billion dollar transaction does not happen quietly, and IBM would have no reason to keep it quiet. This was strategic for IBM (which is actually a bizarrely responsible corporation): They have a strategic interest in seeing Google empowered.

Microsoft and Apple don't want Google to have defensive patents (patents that both of them know that they infringe on in droves, otherwise they wouldn't be concerned about them).

They should have worked to remove all of these patents off the table as cheaply as possible. The available cash that MS+Apple simply dwarfs what Google has.

Dwarfs is a gross exaggeration. Further both Apple and Microsoft have shareholder responsibility. Microsoft has already made questionable judgment calls to maintain the upper hand -- billions of dollars in patents to make a few hundred million a year in extortion fees, while empowering their own primary competitor (Apple)? It's extraordinary. Apple shareholders are going to start demanding their cash back if it looks like one giant ego pile.

And Google can't quietly buy patents because the people selling want to get as much as possible for it. Well except for IBM who just wanted to stick a gank in Oracle.

The fact that their current IP strategy seems to be to buy IP is absurd.

Many of the patents that Microsoft and Apple are using against Android precede the mobile explosion. They are older companies, having had a long time of big profits to pay people to sit around submitting patent applications.

Because Google didn't make that argument, no matter how terribly M G Sielger may misinterpret it.

"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;"

That's what Google actually said. Google partly owning them in concert with Apple and Microsoft does nothing given that Apple and Microsoft are the primary antagonists of Android.

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.

But he was. He is arguing that only a small handful of patents -- those used to attack Apple and/or app store developers -- are the problem with the patent system. That is directly in the section quoted.

His argument seemed to be that instead of Google lobbying to rid the world of software patents, they seemed to be playing the same game as MS, Apple & Oracle by bidding on the Nortel patents.

Google is essentially the bitch of the patent world right now, simply because they're a younger company and a land claim occurred. They can both appeal for changes -- which that very blog entry does in droves -- while preparing for the reality that nothing is going to change overnight.

Google will likely acquire a lot of ammunition (the IBM purchase puts them in a very interesting position relative to Oracle, threatening Oracle's entire platform), make life painful for its competitors, and then will be in a position to call for change without everyone declaring, as they are now, that it is merely convenience.

A few hours later he completely changed position to one where he was mildly critical of Apple for making the app less user friendly. I suspect his overwhelming bias just became too strong for even him to bear.

Apple themselves distilled their own patent into the specific infringement. Their reading was identical to mine.

>the HMS Zealotry

You are in the wrong place. Every one of your tactics is bog standard on borefests like Engadget comments.

I believe that software patents are overwhelmingly farce, whether they support Microsoft in attacking Apple, Apple against Samsung, Samsung against Apple, or any of various IP ventures against App Store developers. It is not a position that varies based upon the actors.

The pro-Apple lobby, however, has a position that essentially holds Apple's patents as legitimate and righteous to enforce, but everyone else's as illegitimate for various reasons. It is farce to criticize lodsys and others for entirely legal IP protections -- as the system supposedly encourages -- while supporting Apple and their like behaviors. Whether a company is open to counter-attacks is irrelevant to the legitimacy of patents.

Virtually everyone who interacts with HN relies upon Linux (for instance as the foundation of their startup). Linux infrgines on countless Microsoft patents. Thus far Microsoft has treaded lightly, but I don't think it's tough to imagine how sentiments would change if they started laying the hammer down, shutting down every cloud host, etc. The simple love of a gadget has many supporting an incredibly dangerous position.

But sentiments are changing. I argue for the exercise of it, but there is no doubt that dramatic software patent changes are coming due.

You say so much while saying so little.

Apple's assault on HTC is a perfect demonstration of the failure of the patent system. Dozens of trivial, laughable patents such as "recognize an email address in a string of text", patented decades after such techniques were commonplace. Do you want to show one with actual value, instead of alluding to some great argument foundation that you don't actually have?

Oh, hey, look, Android isn't actually open. Yuk yuk. What relevance does that have, beyond just partisan posturing? Who cares?

You know thousands of patent holders are realizing the potential value of their patents, looking longingly at Apple's $75 billion dollar cash pile (poor guys. Everyone is stealing their stuff). It will be interesting to see how positions change after Apple comes under constant, unrelenting assault. I already see people like Gruber trying to differentiate patents by their holders, which is so ignorant and fanboy-driven that it should embarrass him.

While the discussion was targeted more at the actual value of software patents (i.e. what specifically Apple 'invented' with their multitouch patents), in actual practice yes such a movie is prior art if the novelty of the patent is the application of multifinger gestures. The idea that you need to show a working implementation is nonsense, and has never been a requirement of the patent system.

Regarding warp drive, the novelty of multitouch is the mere concept of using multifinger gestures on an interface. The novelty of a warp drive is the mechanism of achieving warp drive, not the concept of it.

To put it another way, if you patent a method (or system) of making a car fly, maybe that's an invention. Patenting the concept of flying cars, however, is not.

THAT is the Apple multitouch patent that the industry holds as fearsome. No one gives a shit about the Fingertouch patents.

Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc. The iPaq was a "PDA", however, which somehow differentiates it. I owned one. I know how they are similar.

>You keep inferring that everything presented in the original iPhone was an obvious extension of what we'd seen before, but it simply wasn't.

No, I'm not inferring that whatsoever. I am arguing whether its uniqueness is patentable. We've seen with various iterations of iOS that it is borrowing from its competitors as well. That's how the world works.