(Source: Tulsa World)
By PETER SVENSSON
NEW YORK - When an Internet company plunks down $12.5 billion
to buy a struggling cellphone company for its collection of patents,
it's another sign that, for the high-tech industry, patents have
become a mallet wielded by corporations to pummel their competitors.
Google Inc. announced the deal to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings
Inc. on Monday, specifically for its trove of 17,000 patents. Google
needs them to shield companies like HTC Corp. and Samsung
Electronics Co. - who make phones based on Google's Android
software - from lawsuits filed by Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc.
"Google is not acquiring Motorola for the sake of its technology
or its research," said James Bessen, a lecturer at Boston University
and co-author of a book on the patent system. "Patents have become
legal weapons - they're not representing ideas anymore."
The trend, decades in the making, raises questions that pending
patent legislation in Washington only begins to answer.
Google's multibillion-dollar bid to get its hands on Motorola's
output of legal paperwork is the culmination of a "bubble" in the
value of patents relating to smartphones that started last year, as
Microsoft and Apple mounted their legal attack. Industry watchers
say that bubble may deflate now that Google is set to gain the
protection of Motorola's patents in a deal that's set to close late
this year or early next.
But an underlying problem will keep growing: patent filings and
lawsuits that distract companies and sap resources that are better
spent on other things.
Engineers spend their time writing patents, rather than inventing
things, or reworking products just to avoid patent infringement.
Customers put off purchases because of pending lawsuits, and
independent software developers close up shop because they can't
afford licensing fees.
"If you have to pay $12.5 billion dollars to play, you can sense
why maybe an individual who has a great idea would feel
discouraged," said Julie Samuels, a patent lawyer with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology-oriented civil
liberties group. "It affects the whole economy."
It wasn't always this way. The U.S. software industry got its
start with nary a patent filed, and on the hardware side, patent
suits were rare until the mid-1980s. That was when calculator and
chip maker Texas Instruments Inc., on the brink of extinction,
decided to see if it could make some money from its patent
portfolio. It started filing patent lawsuits and demanding money
from companies with infringing products. It saved the company.
IBM Corp.