Court: Google infringed patents, must pay 1.36 percent of AdWords revenue

Separately, given the allegations in the Ars comment thread:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/01/court-orders-goog...

I'm more than a bit suspicious of a brand-new account that's posting pro-Vringo comments.

"Protection of intellectual property is what America is built on?" Hyperbole much?

"Smart people invent things. Then they get to protect [...] what they invents." Oversimplification much?

Not exactly a home-run defense of patents by Mr. Altucher.

[1]: As admitted by the article, there was no "stealing" here anyway.

> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/31/why-google-might-be-going-t...

That link is definitely worth a few minutes. Thanks.

Moreover, the current system creates a perverse incentive to obfuscate your patent. Although all patents are (eventually) published, there's no requirement that they be published in a manner that's useful (no source code) or discoverable (non-standard jargon). The incentive is not always to make the patent well known until after a party has already invested significant resources into an enterprise, at which point the patent can be used for something pretty close to extortion.

Ie look at the patent, come up with a problem that would make this patent obvious, lock some engineers in a sealed room with the problem, and wait for something like the patent to fall out. Was that independent invention, then?

Only if you take a very generous interpretation of "independent". For an reinvention to be truly independent, the reinventor would not only need to not have read about the original invention, but also to have not read about anything inspired by the original invention, and not talked to anyone who read about anything inspired by the original invention, etc.

My favourite part is just how good the Microsoft lawyers are - "we will pay 5% of whatever Google pays" is an incredibly good deal and shafts Google quite nicely at the same time.

And anyway, isn't this really obvious - to anyone? I have scanned the patents referenced and frankly I don't see any algorithm that is not "return information relevant to the search term presented, and mark the users profile if they liked it"

No implementation details, which frankly seems to be the whole difference in software vs hardware.

Edit: my calculation ignored US only

Before software engineering, the probability of this happening may very well have been low enough to where nobody cared.

But if you're writing code, you are relying on and creating thousands of "inventions" a day. To "claim" one of those inventions so that nobody else can use it is absurd.

The law just doesn't get that yet, which is weird, because big tech companies have been getting burned by it for decades now. I guess they just figure the benefits>costs for them, and when peons get screwed, who cares?

That applies to all economic domains. Patents worked back when it was extremely hard to sell your goods to its entire market, because you were either distance limited, communication limited, or production rate limited. In the first two situations someone could just take your idea, set up half way across the country, and made all the returns.

Today, I can invent anything I want and have it on ebay overnight and ship it anywhere in the world. I can advertise on most major ad services if I want, with an audience of the entire first world. The only limiting factor for me is demand, but that just means I have to be safe when bringing inventions to market, but it is good for the economy overall because it means if I can't meet demand, someone else will pick up the slack.

It is still, like I said, advantageous to the first to market with an idea, enough so that I wouldn't predict much of a drop in novel ideas. Like I said, I would expect more if technology and designs were more open and people could cheaply iterate and extend past concepts more readily.

If several people would claim independent invention, it is obviously a statement about obviousness. So the patent would already be invalid under the current law.

Now, since everyone involved in patents, they don't want to interpret the law that way. So there is a non-written agreement that no one will go that route. and that is idiotic.

A million dollars isn't much for MS to pay to make this go away... and then only paying 5% of Google will be forced to pay if they lose in court.. Microsoft's legal advisor must be happy with himself today

But that is not the point. The point is, that the manual labor gets less and less earnings, but the possession of the properties. How many creative products with high value are in the hands of their creators?

In reality, the high earnings are not made by the inventors or creators of things, but by those that have acquired them in any way. In corporations, it is normal, that inventors just get some small fixed amounts for their inventions. Even in the music business, the musicians have the smallest part of the earnings. Often time, the musicians have to sell the rights to the companies, so the companies are earning most of the money. Only very few musicians can make extra-deals and get rich.

To answer your second question: No, it is absolutely not the intent! By making "intellectual property" the same level as other property, the intent is not, that the inventors should have them (as normal copyright once was intended), but the intention is, that it is a trade-able good, that can be accumulated by the wealthy and used against those that are creative (something, that money is not, so creativity must kept cheap).

I fear Google one day understands that they should join this mafia and start suing for their patents, under the pressure of their shareholders.

Now legal costs and/or Lodsys like trolls might be a real threat to a fledgling business but they seem to have gone quite quiet for the moment.

Patents are NOT just to prevent copying. Patents are not supposed to be worthless against larger companies who can just replicate your work without your help.

If you could just re-engineer any patented invention, patents would be worthless. Companies would be incentivized to bury their heads in the sand so they could be sure they were not 'inspired' by anything out there that might have been patented. The only way to prevent this is to say, we don't care if you "knew" about the patent you still can be found infringing.

The thing I hope will be reversed on appeal is willfulness. It seems to me this was not willful. Or perhaps the definition of 'willful' should be tightened to mean reverse-engineered or copied from a practicing entity. That's one way to get the damage award to be more reasonable.

'Natural' to me means a product or feature which just fits perfectly within the system. A natural solution is the most valuable and often hardest to come by. They also tend to seem incredibly obvious in retrospect, and yet examining history will demonstrate that others suffered for years for lack of that exact functionality.

For example, the intermittent wiper, or the teleprompter, or maybe even the paper clip. It's the ideas that seem the most obvious in retrospect which need the strongest patent protection. But only if you can show it's novel.

One way the patent office will let you demonstrate something is 'non-obvious' is if you can show something is both novel and actually solves a large existing problem in the market. The novel, simple, elegant solution to a large problem is by definition non-obvious, or else someone else would already be doing it.

Back when I was actively studying this stuff, it was noted that there are four specific industries where intellectual property just doesn't work as intended. Software was one, pharma was another, and I forget the other two but a quick Google ought to surface them with more credibility than I can drop here.

That's not to say it works much better outside those industries, but it's not completely pointless.

Not true at all. Copyleft licenses as currently written wouldn't work without copyright law; all-permissive licenses like MIT and BSD would become the default state. I'll happily take that trade, and several folks at the FSF and other FOSS organizations are on record saying the same.