Or as they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.
I expressly did not do that because to me it was an obvious extension of being able to do 'stills'. After all, simply making it move does not require much ingenuity, merely a couple of nights of hard work.
Looking back I'm happy I didn't do that. I refused to 'play the game', even if it could have made me a boatload of money I still stand by that decision.
Whether google is a multinational or a one man shop, to apply for a patent simply because of scaling an existing algorithm up to 'cluster size' in my opinion is not the nicest thing. For them to 'grant' licenses like these and then to receive the kind of groveling gratitude present in that email in return is really disgusting.
In fact, a company called Acacia tried just that. When they found out the parent company was European they lost interest.
We don't have the equivalent of an 'eastern Texas district', where the courts are favorably impressed by anything that carries a patent office stamp.
Going along with wrongdoing, just because that's the way you make it in this world, is a reasonable strategy, sure. But when things are bad enough there is a time for ethical players to sacrifice for a greater purpose.
Each person, including board members and executives, is responsible for the ethics of their own actions and inaction. The "everyone was doing it" argument doesn't hold all that much water when it comes down to it. Everyone is doing a lot of things that I still must make a sacrifice of some sort to choose not to do due to ethics. My decisions are about who I am, not about who they are.
The most appropriate, ethical, behavior is to pursue patents within the current system while simultaneously working towards a better system whereby those patents would be deemed invalid. After all, this puts you in the position to give away the patents you've been granted for free, as Google has, if you truly feel they should not have been given to you in the first place.