Google Patent Purchase Promotion
google.com
google.com
In this promotion, Google's answer to that question is that at the very least, you can be sure you're not selling to a patent troll. They may end up using your patent, or they may not, but they are promising that they will not use the slimy tactics associated with patent trolls.
But the thing about patent trolls is that they're looking for a very specific type of patent: an overly broad one that probably should not have been issued in the first place.
If you don't have that kind of patent, but you do have a patent that is clearly valuable otherwise, then the pool of potential buyers probably won't include patent trolls, so the purported benefit of selling to Google (avoiding selling to patent trolls) is moot.
In which case, you might end up getting a good price from Google (the price you yourself set), or you might end up getting a better price from some other buyer.
But the nice thing about this promotion is that, assuming you're confident there are other buyers out there, you can set your price a little bit higher than you think it's worth and see if Google is willing to bite. If not, go sell it elsewhere.
There are two basic general reasons that a person who would otherwise be willing to sell to an NPE might be interested in selling to Google instead:
1. Google will pay more, and/or
2. Google provides a quicker, easier process for evaluation and decision that means you close the deal and get actual certainty (and the money itself) more quickly and with less of your own time and energy devoted to the process.
Google's effort to established a streamlined process with a "identify your patent and price at which you are committed to sell" up front step, and a well defined set of steps with fairly short time windows leading to a final decision, attempts to address both of those. (Provide a smooth decision process on purchase at the seller's desired price.)
> In this promotion, Google's answer to that question is that at the very least, you can be sure you're not selling to a patent troll.
No, you've got that wrong: that's not the benefit to the seller. That's one of the benefits to Google (and, presuming Google doesn't use patents like a troll, potentially everyone else in the tech industry and everyone indirectly harmed by the drag patent trolls put on the technology market.)
Saw this this morning discussing how Google bought Motorola and is now demanding more royalties for "standard-essential patents", after selling off Motorola (and keeping their patents to use in lawsuits like this): https://twitter.com/FioraAeterna/status/592775596712849408
I don't follow this super closely and so can't say if the claim is 100% true, but it sure was interesting to read about.
Essential patent is a loaded term. I argue all non-trivial patents are essential. If a software patent isn't standard-essential (I'd argue standard is yet another loaded term because FAT32 is a de facto standard for interoperability) it should not be a patent at all. I think you'll agree.
That's not what their FAQ[1] says: "Any patents purchased by Google through this program will join our portfolio and can be used by Google in all the normal ways that patents can be used."
[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...
I think that the example of Microsoft shows how important it is for large tech companies to have lots of cash in order to be able to pivot. I think that Microsoft is pivoting very well right now into platform independent productivity software. If, for example, Google's ad revenue diminishes it is important for them to have long tail reserves to experiment with other ways to be profitable.
Google might subsequently make such a pledge for particular patents it purchases -- or submit them to reciprocal licensing pools, which such a pledge might conflict with or reduce the utility of -- but that's separate from the purchase terms, and there is no good reason to tie them together.
Do you think they would tolerate for a second if you violated their page rank patent?
"As part of our Patent Acquisition Agreement (see section 4.4), sellers will retain a license back to their patent. For you lawyers out there, the license is “irrevocable, nonexclusive, nontransferable, nonassignable (including by operation of law or otherwise), nonsublicensable, worldwide, [and] fully paidup.”
That does no one any good except the seller. For any seller, this kind of thing is table-stakes (no one wants to sell someone a gun pointed at their head).
But if the seller is specifically concerned about their patent being used offensively on others (which I suspect was the original commenter's concern), then this provision is useless.
I think I am misunderstanding you. If they give much more, Google might as well just pay one to void their patent instead of assuming ownership.
The question really is: whose landscape is that?
No, since the whole point of that patent system is to have these examined, reviewed, and notice publicly provided so that people can do business without having to resort to litigation (sure, with the implicit threat of litigation in the background, but examination and patent grants are supposed to provide a degree of clarity.)
Admittedly, that process doesn't work well in all too many cases, but it would make the system orders of magnitude worse if instead of having an in-advance examination process we just had a series of patent applications hanging around waiting for litigation to start to provide an excuse for them to be examined.
Why exactly? For whom?
Because it magnifies the lack of clarity problems in the current poor examination process which both makes litigation between market participants in comparable positions more likely and makes market players with less resources more compelled to knuckle under to those with more because they can't afford the risk of litigation. The greater clarity is provided in advance, the less uncertainty/risk is involved in litigation, which both makes litigation less common and reduces coercion of market participants by those more able to afford risky litigation.
> For whom?
Pretty much everyone, though less for the richest players in the market and the patent lawyers.
Small entity filing fees aren't too bad.
Back of the envelope numbers: you might save 50% of the current costs of obtaining a patent. It'd still be far from free.
With this construct, an inventor could go to e.g. Google, and sell them this idea ("potential patent"). This way, small inventors wouldn't need to have a big pile of cash just to secure their ideas.
The idea of the patent is (at leas in part) to protect inventor's investment. When someone spent significant effort researching and prototyping some useful device, it makes sense to pay a small sum for its legal protection from copycats.
If someone just stumbled upon an idea, without any plans to use it for profit and without sunk costs that one would like to protect, why grant a patent? Someone else could (and historically did) invent the same thing independently, and put it to actual use. Why impede the efforts of that latter person?
While we're at, it let me remind the idea of exponential patent fees.
A patent should require e.g. $100 to keep for the first year, $400 for the next year, $1600 for the third year, etc, quadrupling the cost each year. If you're on a gold mine like Singer's needle, or Edison's lamp, or a transistor, you have no trouble paying for that patent for 10 or maybe 20 years. If you patented something useful but minor, you can keep it patented as long as it makes financial sense, and then put it to public domain. If you're a NPE patent troll, you're toast in a really short term.
2. This is not new for Google either. They have been quietly talking to and buying from various kinds of patent holders for many years now.
3. I'd be very interested to know what kinds of patents they're hoping to buy. Are they looking for "bad" patents to really "disarm the trolls"? Or are they just hoping to get good ones for cheap and use the "patent troll" narrative for PR? Unfortunately, I doubt they'll disclose the results of this promotion.
I think you don't quite understand what is supposed to be new about it.
> Large companies like GE have patent-buying departments that do something similar, except they are are a lot more flexible
Google has a patent buying department and program that offers a more flexible, but less well-defined and streamlined process -- this new program refers to it as an option for patents that don't meet the criteria for this experimental new streamlined process.
The new part (and Google says this directly) is the attempt the experiment with more streamlined process to reduce friction.
> This is not new for Google either. They have been quietly talking to and buying from various kinds of patent holders for many years now.
Having a patent purchase program isn't new, and Google doesn't claim that it is (in fact, their materials on the new program point to the pre-existing one as well); what is new is the particular process.
> I'd be very interested to know what kinds of patents they're hoping to buy. Are they looking for "bad" patents to really "disarm the trolls"? Or are they just hoping to get good ones for cheap and use the "patent troll" narrative for PR?
I don't think there really worried about "for cheap"; I think they want to provide a good experience for sellers so that people interested in arms-length sales of patents (whether the kinds that trolls are most interested or not) that might be useful to Google (whether for troll neutralization or otherwise -- and even good patents in the hands of someone whose interest is to in maximizing short-term return can be harmful to industry players other than the patent-holder, so "bad" patents aren't the only threat to Google out there) have a better chance of being offered to Google, so Google has a chance to act on them. They don't really need them "for cheap", except compared to the cost of potential litigation or workarounds -- to Google or, e.g., its hardware partners -- if some hostile party were to end up holding them.
In fact, one of the models IV actually seems to have is closer to what Google is proposing here... They have a "sell your invention" page that has similar inputs as what Google describes. Again, I've never interacted with IV, but I expect it's be like any other licensing negotiations rather than "name your price, we'll buy it if we like it".
So the big difference (other than being a practicing entity) is, to your point, Google has made the process simpler by eliminating the negotiation aspect. This certainly would be a good experience for sellers... If it works. The reason everybody else negotiates is because it's very hard to price patents (or anything, really). Unless you have a dialog about why each side think it's worth what, nobody will agree on a price.
As such I would guess Google will end up acquiring only those patents that are actually useful and people underprice. These will be very few mostly because 1) very few patents actually cover anything useful and 2) people almost always vastly overvalue their inventions. I say this partly from personal experience and partly from hearsay, but the fact that the vast majority (95% +) of active patents lie fallow backs this up. People have paid thousands for a piece of paper that they're getting 0 returns on.
Google may very well get some good patents submitted, but if they don't negotiate, they will either leave them on the table or pay more than they're worth. Certainly would be very interesting to see how this turns out.
Even so Google is different in the high-level meta structure of how it is doing it differently, since it has a both an established and still operational more traditional, more flexible, more general, and less streamlined system and the new, experimental, less flexible, more specific, and more streamlined system. It's essentially do a public (not "visible only to insiders", though obviously the operational details of the results are unlikely to be public) real-business-at-stake side-by-side test of different options.
> As such I would guess Google will end up acquiring only those patents that are actually useful and people underprice.
I suspect that there are a wide range of potential patents that have expected value to Google that exceeds their expected value to most (and possibly any) other market participant that could actually muster the resources to pay that value, so I don't think "underpriced" is the only option.
I also don't think "useful" in the sense that the patent actually covers a useful invention is necessary, anything that might provide a remotely colorable case for a Google-hostile entity to use against something useful Google does or might do in the life of the patent (even if it doesn't actually cover the thing Google is concerned about, and even if it wouldn't survive scrutiny in a lawsuit) can have positive net utility for Google to secure to prevent a hostile party from doing so if the price tag is less than the expected cost of defeating it in a lawsuit times the probability of such a suit should a hostile party get a hold of it.
> Google may very well get some good patents submitted, but if they don't negotiate, they will either leave them on the table or pay more than they're worth.
Paying above-market price but spending less resources on the pre-purchase process than would be spent getting down to market price can be a net win. An even bigger net win if it makes Google such an attractive place to shop your patents that the most threatening patents that would otherwise get picked up by Google-hostile entities end up getting shopped to Google first.
How can you sell an unptaented(or maybe just loosely patent-pending idea you did the work yourself, as a non-lawyer) ?
Edit: I don't know how they actually "acquire" it, but I'm guessing they offer payment and a portion of future royalties for exclusive rights. But you do bring up a good point - since there is no patent, the scope of the rights being acquired is legally undefined.
Sell everything to Google and live on its mercy…. that is what Google wants.