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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyone not simultaneously suing and getting sued over patents? It's like a war zone where each company tries hard to screw over every other company in their space. Then they go collaborate on Web standards. If these were people instead of businesses you'd have to assume they had mental illnesses.

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The worst thing is many investors who hold shares of one company also holds shares of the competitor, and hence they are spending money wildly to make their portfolio as a whole worth less.

> Is there anyone not simultaneously suing and getting sued over patents?

Yes. Google is getting sued lots but they are not suing anybody. I suppose selling (or giving??) a patent to HTC who then sues using it is sort of indirectly suing though.

I thought only Oracle was suing Google Is someone else suing Google?

Well according to a search for "sues google" there's also at least Skyhook, Paypal, Ebay, Zynga and Paul Allen's Trollco. I'd say the lawsuits from Apple and Microsoft count even though they are indirectly suing Google.

Umm... I think you read my question wrong. Who's not suing Google? :-)

Ah, finally a chance to use this service ...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=who+is+suing+google

Hmm since when did my tablet grow a cursor? Are you using hacks? :)

Google's like that guy who says he's sick of rich douchebags driving their Porsches around and cutting everyone else off in traffic but then he wins the lottery and what do you know he goes out and buys a Porsche and finds that the superior handling, acceleration and compact chassis lends itself to exploiting gaps in traffic they would not have with their old Honda Accord.

It was but obvious that Google will start suing the moment they got their hands on patents that they can use to sue people with. So much for Do no evil :)

It's "Don't be evil" — a much less ambitious goal. Ordinary people do marginally evil things all the time without being thought of as being evil on the whole.

And it's a pretty weird morality where protecting yourself makes you, as a whole, "evil."

I don't see where Good or Evil enter into any of this.

Does Android/HTC infringe on some Apple patents? Maybe.

Does Apple infringe on some of these patents Google has given to HTC? Maybe.

Are the likely outcomes more favorable to Android/Google/HTC with Google having given HTC these patents? Almost certainly.

So that's how you justify Google's actions? By play of words?

In my eyes, Google is just a Microsoft wannabe.

That said, I do not think their current actions are in any way evil or immoral. In fact I would lose faith in Android if they weren't doing this.

So I wonder if this definition of suing (transferring a patent to a third party who uses it defensively) is evil to you, how evil is Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, etc?

I never said Apple Oracle or Microsoft are not evil but they never did either. Google is hypocrite here claiming to do no evil while suing others through a partner.

So in your morality hypocrisy trumps everything. Being a tiny bit evil and advocating against being evil is worse to you than actually being extremely evil and saying nothing?

Being evil while proclaiming to not do evil is lying. What credibility would you grant to a company that does it. And this is just one occurance. Claiming to be open when withholding source code to latest android releases, stealing content from publishers like yelp to boost its own local pages. Giving preferential treatment to its own sites/products over others in search results... the list is endless.

Sadly yes: the patent trolls get to sue, but because they have no products themselves (indeed, they have no nothing other than a legal shell and a few patent assets) they aren't sued back.

Amen brother

But businesses are made up of people. Lawyers work in the legal department. Web standards people work in the Web standards department. I have little doubt that reading news like this makes the Web standards people sad, but they still feel like their work is valuable in the space they occupy and carry on with their jobs.

I suppose I assume that the lawyers justify their work somehow, because nobody wants to think that what they do is inherently bad. I think buying up patents specifically to sue people is bad, but I imagine if I worked in the legal field I would feel that it's only fair to fight back.

Not quite: businesses (or corp's) are effectively made of groups of people. These particular groups seem to want to act more psychopathically / self-interested than an individual might -- think mobs or riots.

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