Money Matters, Simplified.
Google buys over 1000 IBM patents
by Jamie Anderson - July 31, 2011 - comments
Google may have failed to grab a huge portfolio of Nortel patents, but it has successfully bought more than 1,000 patents from IBM.
In a move that could trigger an intellectual-property arms race in the tech sector, search giant Google reportedly bought more than 1,000 technology patents from IBM.
Google’s deal with IBM was confirmed Friday by The Wall Street Journal. However, the amount shelled out by the internet search giant to buy these patents was not divulged.
Aim is to protect Android
Google’s Android mobile device operating system is “open source, easily adaptable and has had wide success with phone manufacturers.”
At the heart of the acquisition is the need to ward off potential legal challenges to Android OS which is used in smartphones, tablets and other gadgets.
“Like many tech companies, at times we'll acquire patents that are relevant to our business needs. Bad software patent litigation is a wasteful war that no one will win.” --Google spokesperson
Google's general consul Kent Walker made no bones in stating that the company feels that the only recourse against “potential patent lawsuits is to acquire some for itself.”
With the latest purchase Google has got hold of patents pertaining to SEO, servers, routers, relational databases, object oriented programming, and fabrication and architecture of memory and micro processing chips.
Battle in courts is waste
“Like many tech companies, at times we'll acquire patents that are relevant to our business needs. Bad software patent litigation is a wasteful war that no one will win,” stated a Google spokesperson.
Google had earlier lost a bidding war to rivals Apple and Microsoft and thus could not latch on to some 6,000 patents put up for sale by Nortel Networks Corp.
“We buy companies all the time—for both people and interesting technologies. This would have been north of $4 billion for none of those things. We were bidding on the right to stop people from innovating,” Walker said in an interview with TechCrunch.
It is widely believed that InterDigital Inc., a company that develops advanced wireless technologies and is an owner of numerous patents, is Google’s next target.
While companies that compete in the arena of technological products vie for a bigger pie of market share through better products and better technologies, they also slug it out in courts over patent violations.
Clear ownership of a patent can prove a potential barrier to entry for a rival firm.