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Comment by rkischuk | Hacker News Reader

We are in the midst of the intellectual property Cold War, and it's fascinating to watch. If Google can use Motorola's patents to balance the power in patent suits and avoid $20/device in licensing fees... well, they're activating 550k devices per day, so that's $11M/day in savings. Roughly 3 years to break-even on that basis alone.

Google can use Motorola to force the issues that have plagued Android for a while. Motorola devices will probably become "pure Android" devices like the Nexus series, pushing carriers to abandon the crapware and carrier-specific UIs they're infatuated with.

Most people I know with Motorola Android devices say the build quality is for crap. I hope Google can improve this, but if not, I hope they can at least get the carriers to quit layering garbage on HTC's nice hardware.

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>We are in the midst of the intellectual property Cold War, and it's fascinating to watch.

I find it sad to watch. Any hope of patent reform in the US got a lot bleaker in 2011 due to the billions being spent on defensive portfolios, especially in the mobile space. There's no way these companies are going to let any legislation pass that invalidates their 'investments'. The best we seem to be able to hope for is that Google uses theirs defensively only, or adds them to copyleft-style patent pools like openinventionnetwork.com or openpatents.org. I harbor little hope that Apple or MS would do the same.

Sad can be fascinating. It is sad to seem so much cash thrown at failing/failed companies, where it does little to create jobs or encourage innovation.

I do expect Google to use these patents more as a defensive neutralizer than as a means of attack - that's just consistent with their track record.

I hope (but doubt) that our Congress will see the amount of economic value being wasted on IP chess, and reform the system. All it takes is leadership and intelligence, both of which seem to be sorely lacking in government. Thankfully, these companies don't have formal veto power over legislation.

Couldn't they see patent reform as a way of avoiding having to spend billions more in the future? I suppose it depends on whether each company sees the patent game as a cost or a profit center.

Yep, a company that only uses patents defensively (Google, so far) would have nothing to lose by invalidating software/business patents as a whole.

Really? I've heard mostly good things about motorola build quality.

Personally, I've had the OG droid for a year and half now, and it is rock solid -- I've taken terrible care of it, drop it on concrete all the time, and yet it still works fine.

The Motorola Droid is a good, solid phone.

My only beef with it is that it's a pretty locked-down phone, which is why I went with Samsung instead.

"We are in the midst of the intellectual property Cold War, and it's fascinating to watch."

I prefer the term 'patent-a-geddon' because it isn't at all like the cold war, no implied threat here, its all out mutually assured destruction. I think it can go either way, toward or away from saner patent law, it will certainly create giant nest eggs for law firms. If the '90s were the dot.com bubble this is perhaps the ip-law bubble.

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