$4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
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Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#2This article is awfully thin. It doesn't give any argument whatsoever for why software patents are not a good thing. Here's a summary:
1. Google, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and Sony are willing to pay a lot of money for a bundle of patents, including both software and hardware.
2. Therefore, software patents are evil and a tax on innovation, rabble rabble rabble.
It's not much of a syllogism.
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#3This article is awfully thin. It doesn't give any argument whatsoever for why software patents are not a good thing. Here's a summary: 1. Google, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and Sony are willing to pay a lot of money for a bundle of patents, including both software and hardware. 2. Therefore, software patents are evil and a tax on innovation, rabble rabble rabble. It's not much of a syllogism.
I think that the argument for why software patents are dangerous is the $4.5 billion figure. If companies are shitting their pants to this extent then clearly the patents have a huge impact on business from their perspective.
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#4This article is awfully thin. It doesn't give any argument whatsoever for why software patents are not a good thing. Here's a summary: 1. Google, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and Sony are willing to pay a lot of money for a bundle of patents, including both software and hardware. 2. Therefore, software patents are evil and a tax on innovation, rabble rabble rabble. It's not much of a syllogism.
I think that the argument for why software patents are dangerous is the $4.5 billion figure. If companies are shitting their pants to this extent then clearly the patents have a huge impact on business from their perspective.
Exactly. The price is well above expert estimates. While these tech giants can afford that extra cost, the same tension is playing out for smaller startups that cannot.
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#5This article is awfully thin. It doesn't give any argument whatsoever for why software patents are not a good thing. Here's a summary: 1. Google, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and Sony are willing to pay a lot of money for a bundle of patents, including both software and hardware. 2. Therefore, software patents are evil and a tax on innovation, rabble rabble rabble. It's not much of a syllogism.
The argument is simple, not thin. Instead of spending billions on new R&D, new innovation, these companies have to spend money on the shenanigans of the current software patent system.
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#6I don't understand. For one thing, Google wasn't "the early front runner", they were the stalking horse bid--essentially the minimum. There seems to be this retroactive meme going around to the effect that Google was expected to win with that bid or that they somehow deserved to. It's an auction, folks.
It's not clear to me that that was their final bid, either. Maybe it was, but I can't imagine Google letting something important to them climb at auction from from $0.9 billion to $4.5 billion without staking another bid.
The second thing I don't understand is the connection between the price paid by a consortium of major tech companies[1] for a collection of patents from a formerly major tech company--only a few of which are even software at all--to Fred Wilson ranting about Lodsys. Who is the troll here? Nortel? What is the significance of the dollar figure? How does it "echo the sentiment" of Wilson?
[1]:BetaBeat says "...a coalition of Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and Sony...", while the actual press release[2] states: "Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony."
[2]:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nortel-announces-the-winnin...
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#7This article is awfully thin. It doesn't give any argument whatsoever for why software patents are not a good thing. Here's a summary: 1. Google, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and Sony are willing to pay a lot of money for a bundle of patents, including both software and hardware. 2. Therefore, software patents are evil and a tax on innovation, rabble rabble rabble. It's not much of a syllogism.
I think that the argument for why software patents are dangerous is the $4.5 billion figure. If companies are shitting their pants to this extent then clearly the patents have a huge impact on business from their perspective.
But if these patents were say, automotive in nature, and a coalition of automotive companies bought them for 4.5 billion, would we immediately jump to the conclusion that automotive patents are bad? I wouldn't (necessarily).
I have to agree with the parent comment.
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#8I don't understand. For one thing, Google wasn't "the early front runner", they were the stalking horse bid--essentially the minimum. There seems to be this retroactive meme going around to the effect that Google was expected to win with that bid or that they somehow deserved to. It's an auction, folks. It's not clear to me that that was their final bid, either. Maybe it was, but I can't imagine Google letting someth…
The complaining was around companies needing to spend $4.5B in pre-emptive legal defense. The $4.5B being pre-emptive is extrapolated by me (and I'm assuming the author) from Google stating their $900M was.
Nowhere in the article did it even imply any of the players in this transaction were trolls.
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the argument for why software patents are dangerous is the $4.5 billion figure. If companies are shitting their pants to this extent then clearly the patents have a huge impact on business from their perspective.
But if these patents were say, automotive in nature, and a coalition of automotive companies bought them for 4.5 billion, would we immediately jump to the conclusion that automotive patents are bad? I wouldn't (necessarily). I have to agree with the parent comment.
>if these patents were say, automotive in nature, and a coalition of automotive companies bought them for 4.5 billion, would we immediately jump to the conclusion that automotive patents are bad?
Without going too deep into a philosophical discussion, I think that the competitive nature of our society is hindering progress more than anything else. When people learn to build social structures based on cooperation (I consider a small group of people cooperating to compete against everyone else to be too small in scope), we will see progress increase by orders of magnitude. Just look at the advantage the limited type of cooperation we have now has given us over animals which do not cooperate at all. Now scale that up to the next level (open source is a live example of this, in fact). In concrete terms, imagine if, just as individuals in a company cooperate, companies cooperated with each other. Everyone would be better off. At it's root, this is the difference between seeing life as a non-zero-sum game as opposed to a zero-sum one.
Re: $4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
#10I worked briefly at Nortel. It makes me sad reading these articles. Nortel was a great company that still could have been successful today were it not for terrible corrupt high level management.