Who Won The 6,000+ Nortel Patents? Apple, RIM, Microsoft — Everyone But Google | Hacker News Reader

Who Won The 6,000+ Nortel Patents? Apple, RIM, Microsoft — Everyone But Google

techcrunch.com

30 pointsBvS24 comments

It kind of feels like when you're winning in Risk early on and all the other players band together just to destroy you. Sure, it's not against the rules, and it's good strategy, but you still think they're all dicks.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I'm going to assume that Google did its due diligence, came up with a value to bid on the patents (that includes future costs of law suits, royalties owed/earned, as well as new technologies derived from the patents) and made that bid.

In that case, what their opponents pay (or perhaps, overpay) is no longer Google's concern. That's the mindset you have to take in an auction.

Unfortunately, the cost of the lawsuit will be borne by the handset makers and not by Google. The price of these patents is fairly indeterminable because the chilling effect of the almost certainly imminent lawsuits is hard to estimate. Now Google has no choice but to back the OEMs to the hilt and fight this to the death in the courts.

Did Google know who they were bidding against?

That's part of the risk assessment. They would have to account for the fact that competitors would also bid on the patents.

So you think they didn't know?

What's the status of the patents in the package?

Looking up random patents from a (2006) list of Nortel patents (http://www.nortel.com/corporate/technology/patents/collatera...) yields things like "Patent Expired Due to NonPayment of Maintenance Fees Under 37 CFR 1.362" (http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/!ut/p/c5/04_SB8K8xLL...)

It's possible that those 6000+ patents contain only a handful which are (a) strategically useful (b) not defunct and (c) won't expire in the next few years. After all, when's the last time Microsoft got a good deal on something?

4G LTE technology. That's hugely valuable to everyone in the mobile space.

Seems like Microsoft, Apple, and RIM would like to have a couple of bargaining chips with the folks who own the rest of the cell patents.

This seems an awful lot like collusion (IANAL), and if it isn't illegal, it sure feels like it should be.

Google should have gotten in on the deal with the rest to pay a bit more and open-source them all.

Licensing groups are pretty common. In manufacturing, it is almost impossible in some areas to build anything without them.

How so? Why should companies be forbidden to purchase property as a group? How is the objective (licensing some patents) illegal?

Also, how exactly does one 'open source' a patent? Patents are not modifiable after the application is submitted, and as soon as they are granted the document is viewable by all. As far as I know Google does not license their patents for free, so why would they buy a bunch of patents just to license them for free?

Regarding Google and open source, you'd be hard pressed to find a line of open source code from Google for anything that makes them money.

Yes, but if they are purchasing this property together to use as a weapon against another company... it seems awfully anti-competitive. Similarly, you could make a similar assertion that "companies should be allowed to sell their products at prices they decide", but it's quite another thing if several get together to do this to put another organisation out of business (or drive-up prices). It's anti-competitive and (eventually) bad for everyone.

Regarding 'open source', I'm assuming you can buy a patent and put it in the public domain or some similar construction. This may be attractive for a group of companies who are all being blackmailed into licensing. It may even be worth paying a premium for, as it could reduce exposure to risks (licensor changing his mind, competitor buying license and suing, etc).

Wow. If there was any proof needed that patents seldom help the "underdog", here it is.

Calling Google the underdog is not quite accurate.

This is such a pointless and counter-productive war.

One of their mistakes was to publicly announce they were placing a major bid to protect themselves against patent litigation. Their opponents sensed weakness and trashed the party. This will be yet another business case for corporate secrecy.

Or maybe they had no real interest at all and were instead making a big PR game out of it to get the others to spend more than they would have?

Why didn't Google gather around all the Android manufacturers from the beginning and make a pool with them? Why did they risk losing the patents by going at it alone?

It only took Apple to try to bid for them, and they could've beaten Google if they really wanted, simply because they can afford to lose more cash than Google. Google should've considered this from the beginning. And in reality it was even worse, it more allied against them to get the patents, so Apple didn't even have to bother too much for them.

I think it was a newbie mistake to not get all Android manufacturers or the whole OHA to pay for them.

I get the feeling that the shake-up at the top had something to do with how uncoordinated they seem in this. It really looks like everyone else decided they didn't really want to spend huge money on something the DoJ was watching. Apple and Microsoft already have patent deals together and had, by accounts, a not so fun experience in video patents. RIM stills has the scars from their last patent war. Heck, Kodak has caused each of these companies problems. I am sure it was one of those "let's form a patent pool" things.

Google's behavior with WebM / h.264 probably made them an unsuitable partner, never mind the market share thing.

Does the word cartel mean anything to the DOJ? I guess we'll find out.

Now, why was EMC in the cartel? My first reaction was that this is the higher margin companies ganging up to defeat the low cost free software strategy. But why would EMC/Cisco want to join in?

Presumably Nortel's patent portfolio contains a significant number of patents which could be applied to networking because Nortel had it's roots as a phone company.

Exactly - Nortel had a big portfolio of phone switches (the DMS-10 and DMS-100 are the two that leap to mind) and I would assume a rich collection of switch patents as well.

Too bad they blew up - can anyone recommend a good write-up about their implosion? I interned there and had a job offer that was rescinded around the time the dot com bust occurred. My recollection is that they heavily leveraged themselves to make a run at beating Cisco in the IP switch market. When everything melted down, they had nowhere to run.

MG is happy. It worked for Apple and Google was left out. That's all there is to the post. I naively expected some more details.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com