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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

Patents don't protect smaller players -- enforcement is cost-prohibitive.

The only sector that could plausibly justify patents is biotech... but even there, the vast majority of early R&D is publicly-funded, and thus should negate protection.

A Government-mandated monopoly on ideas may have made sense at some point, but it's antiquated today. Today they serve to stifle innovation, extract rent and act as yet another form of regulatory capture -- e.g. when they become standards.

(Coming from someone who has 20+ patents to their name.)

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In fact they have the opposite effect on smaller players. The big players all have a few thousand (junk) patents and they make deals with each other to exclude the smaller players, who can't afford to file thousands of patents to join the club.

Or worse, a small player developing something and then finding out after the fact that a junk patent prevents them from even selling the thing to begin with.

See, this to me is the stupidest part of the whole system. Its essentially saying that 'first movers advantage' of an idea is something that can be protected for the life of a patent.

You can be tripped over by patents you don't even know existed in unrelated fields, owned by people who didnt even work with the patent. So stupid.

Everyone always says this. In fact, I was in Google's patent litigation division, and I can tell you firsthand that there is WAY less of this than you think. A cross-licensing deal is incredibly hard to negotiate.

So if you could back this up with some links, it'd be appreciated. Otherwise it's just an urban myth.

they might mean an unspoken deal no to sue each other rather than a written one

usually what I hear is "they've cross-licensed." That doesn't translate as "unspoken deal."

It's not a myth, I've been involved in these sort of negotiations. The particular industry was maybe 10 years older than Google, but the number of patents, rather than their quality was the key factor.

since I've been watching Mythbusters:

this one is not "confirmed." It's "plausible."

There are some, but it's nowhere near universal.

All from the first page of quick Google search...

Google and Samsung sign global patent cross-license deal

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-and-samsung-s...

Google and Tencent agree to cross-license patents

https://www.ft.com/content/0a1b904d-77f9-3b48-885d-0c2693a6d...

SAP and Google Cozy Up With Wide-Reaching Patent Deal: The Potential Implications

https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/insights/sap-and-go...

Google and Cisco Enter Into Patent Cross-Licensing Agreement

https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2014/m02/go...

Samsung is an Android partner. Google already indemnifies them for patent infringement, so no surprise there.

Tencent is from 5 years ago, and it gives no details on how many patents are involved.

SAP is from 9 years ago.

Cisco is 9 years ago as well. I was in Legal for that one. It took months of negotiating.

Note there is no cross-licensing deal with Apple, Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon.

So you're saying: Clearly not an urban myth.

Google literally bought Motorola for their patent portfolio -- or at least, that's the only "asset" they retained when divesting of the company years later. And I readily admit: Google is a "be less evil" player in this respect. (But not all: See wage fixing collusion verdicts.)

At some point, we have to acknowledge that patents are pursued purely in the spirit of mutually-assured destruction from other litigious players. This manifests as a tax on everyone -- the only people that win are attorneys.

So now you're moving the goal posts. Now it's MAD (which I don't deny). I think we're done here. You're also bringing up irrelevancies like wage fixing: true, but not patents.

the claim was "they cross-license." As I said if you read, the myth is "plausible" but not "confirmed."

yes, there are some cross-licenses. No, they are not universal. I gave examples of obvious ones that nevertheless don't exist.

On Motorola: I'm afraid I have to claim superior knowledge on that one. At the time, Google was actually hiring patent acquisition people, and in fact, I was interviewing them. They probably fell for the myth that you fell for.

They stopped that pretty quickly, when it became clear that most of Motorola's patents were worthless. I've looked them over myself. They were worth less than nothing: it meant that suits against Motorola now had to be defended. In other words, it was a big mistake that they undid.

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