171–180 of 291 posts
I wonder if anyone in Google is wishing that they hadn't tried to adorably bid pi billion, and had instead played to win.
This is a rather silly meme. Bidders were allowed to place more than one bid.
That's more than one bid.
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I think you are looking at it inside a box, as an isolated issues. Patent litigation is simply a weapon used by companies offensively or defensively. When in a fight with your competitors you look at your weapons and theirs. When evaluating the visible weaponry of their competitors they see patent litigation near the top of the list. When they look at their arsenal of weapons, they do not see patent litigation at the…
Isn't this like nation-states trying to prevents wars so that they can compete on building effective societies? It would be perversely cynical to suggest that the nations more confident in their ability to deliver effective societies were somehow cheating by trying to prevent the needless destruction and waste of wars.
The problem with this is that prior to the introduction of the iPhone, android was designed to look like and work on phones like the blackberry. It was a better feature phone OS. After the iPhone came out, Google changed courses and counterfeited the iPhone. If google wanted to compete, they could have spent 7 years investing in fundamental innovations-- like Apple did with touch-- to create their own new UI. Maybe t…
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This is a rather silly meme. Bidders were allowed to place more than one bid.
What you're saying does not contradict the meme at all. The meme goes that Google first bid Brun's constant, then upped it to the Meissel–Mertens constant, and finally pi. That's more than one bid.
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The patent is owned by Stanford. From Wikipedia: The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sol…
Being an exclusive licensee provides significant rights to Google, for example, they could sue for infringement of that patent.
Could be wrong, though, but I seem to recall a similar story in the news not too long ago.
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Can you point to a clear, major innovation software innovation that they are currently being sued for? I can't think of any. I'm also not seeing the difference between "It's nearly impossible to write a nontrivial program that doesn't infringe patents" and "I do not believe I could write any significant program that was entirely patent free."
"Can you point to a clear, major innovation software innovation that they are currently being sued for? I can't think of any." Java ("everything else sucks" - Google), miscellaneous mobile innovations belonging to all sorts of companies via proxy (because they don't actually ship phones). They haven't been sued over VP8 yet but it's likely coming barring licensing. ... "I'm also not seeing the difference between ..."…
VP8 was designed to avoid patents, but there's so much stuff patented in the audio and video fields that it's nearly impossible to avoid infringing.
Is this why we're seeing a sudden burst of anti-patent news? Is Google in the early phases of drumming up grassroots support for a direct assault on software patents in general, without their name being on the effort? Is this post actually move 3 instead of move 1? Honest questions, BTW, if there's anybody with answers who are allowed to give answers...
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I'd say the dynamic is more complicated, many small businesses are highly reliant on IP protections. Innovators are pro-IP, followers are contra-IP.
Innovators are pro-IP, followers are contra-IP. Strongly disagree. This kind of statement really needs some supporting evidence.
http://infochachkie.com/fast-followers-i/
"Whenever creating an imitation of a successful leader, great care must be taken to avoid outright intellectual property infringement; the closer the duplication, the greater the care which must be exercised. MGA Entertainment (MGA), which produced the Bratz dolls, learned this the hard way. Late in 2008, U.S. Courts forced MGA to cease and desist in the manufacture of the dolls. A jury deemed that the creator of Bratz, Carter Bryant, devised the idea while he was an employee at Mattel. In the Spring of 2009, a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the jury decision, mandating that the intellectual property associated with Bratz dolls was the sole property of Mattel."
I find Google's stance here ingenuous. They're attempting to portray themselves as the persecuted innovator, but their behaviour in the market in question doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. While the patents Apple are using to attack Android with seem dubious, the motivation for this tactic is obvious. Google extremely blatantly cloned the look and feel of the iPhone and have pursued a strategy of dumping Android i…
There are actually quite a few differences between Android and iOS in terms of interface, and there always have been -- in fact, many features found in later versions of iOS were found first in earlier versions of Android, such as copy & paste, wallpapers, and the upcoming notification area. In addition, applications are presented differently (you have to slide up a panel, generally, or tap a button somewhere to get to them), wallpapers can be dynamic (Live Wallpapers), and Android is, in general, much more reliant on menu structures than iOS, which seems to take a more simple and transparent route to most functions.
Sure, there are similarities -- like the fact that it's a touch interface and applications are represented first as icons -- but I'm inclined to think they're less prevalent than seems to be thought, and the ones that are there are (more or less) common sense. (I could be wrong, of course :))