

Facebook Buys 750 IBM Patents To Defend Against Yahoo  - mrkmcknz
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/22/facebook-buys-750-ibm-patents-to-defend-against-yahoo/

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donaldc
None of this patent fight between facebook and yahoo will "promote the
Progress of Science and useful Arts". It's a giant waste of time and
resources. Software patents should be invalidated.

(Quote from the Copyright and Patent Clause of the U.S. Constitution.)

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fossuser
I agree - I wrote a bit about copyright
[here](<http://zacharyalberico.com/day/2012/01/24>) that relates somewhat.

Patents are in a much better place as far as the the limited time part goes
(only 20 years), but they don't make sense and shouldn't apply to software -
where they clearly don't work.

The goal behind patents is to encourage companies to publicly reveal their
designs in exchange for a guaranteed monopoly of 20 years. The monopoly is a
necessary evil in order for the public to benefit from advancements that might
otherwise remain perpetual trade secrets. In the case of software, the
monopoly drastically outweighs any public benefit of being public and seems
instead to be used to stifle the innovation of others.

~~~
mc32
If they don't invalidate SW patents, maybe an option would be to limit the
protection to say, 3 years?

This would allow for some patents to be relevant, if companies thought it was
worth their while. But, given the limited (time of) protection, most would
probably decide it was not a great business strategy --such that it would
specially make SW Patent Trolls unviable.

~~~
wmf
The counterargument is that many legitimate innovations made no money in the
first three years. Often when we hear about a "new" thing it's actually years
old at that point. For example, RSA didn't take off for 18 years; even with a
17-year patent they only got about four years of licensing revenue
(1996-2000).

~~~
mc32
True. There will be losers in this equation, but equally, there will be
winners (the SW economy, at large). In that particular example, they came into
the market before the SW side of the economy had matured as much as it has
today. At present it's a much more mature and dynamic economy. Given the rate
of change, 3 or even 5 years, night be a viable compromise.

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mkramlich
Extrapolating from the contents of the software patents I have seen, I shudder
to think at how much utter slop and obvious-to-any-engineer-versed-in-the-
field kinds of patents are going to be among those 750. "A method by which a
button is rendered on the screen such that it can be clicked on with a mouse,
causing some action to occur." etc, etc. Also the fact that any company could
even buy software patents, let alone buy 750 of them, makes the system look
absurd. The whole point was to reward the original inventors. Now it rewards
trolls and lawyers and those with big war chests.

(a method by which my comments are posted to a website configured as a
discussion forum with an orange bar at the top. the target website may also
include links to other pages, and include caching.)

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togasystems
It seems that the winners of the Patent Troll wars are the older technology
companies.

~~~
kareemm
It's certainly not users. Imagine the resources being devoted to battling
lawsuits that could be spent creating a better customer experience.

~~~
tatsuke95
Billions. It's obscene. And the worst part is no layman outside of the tech
circles knows it's happening.

> _It only had 56 issued and 503 filed patents in the US._

And Facebook is considered to have a _light_ patent portfolio. 500+ in the
works? Really? And they're victims? Craziness.

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relaunched
Given the projected market cap of Facebook, relative to Yahoo, the settlement
could be worth 1/2 of Yahoo's market cap or more. Given Yahoo's revenues and
they way patent infringement is punitively calculated, the infringement on
Facebook's newly accounted patents would have to be worth a huge portion of
Yahoo's revenue to matter. Otherwise, Yahoo could just close down the
infringing services, settle on the back stuff, and continue suing Facebook.

If IBM's patents were core to how Yahoo made money, IBM would have already
sued and / or licensed them to Yahoo. The fact that they didn't, leads me to
believe that a lot of attorneys, on Facebook's behalf, are going to be billing
tons of hours looking to find a square needle, to fit into a round hole, at
the bottom of a HUGE haystack.

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chii
you underestimate the way patents tend to get worded, and the "broad"
applicability of some software patents.

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bsphil
I hope more people take note of the absurdity of the current software patent
system because of this fight.

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jamesaguilar
That's a pretty smart way to deal with the problem. Yahoo is not a patent
troll in the sense that it has no assets of its own to lose. It is far more
vulnerable to this sort of counterattack than, say, Intellectual Ventures.

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iamandrus
So Facebook is going to fight fire with fire? This is not the way to handle
it.

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NathanKP
It's common for companies who both patented technologies each other need to
use to make an agreement where they exchange rights to use each others
patents. It is strategic and keeps them both moving forward while still
keeping the little guy down.

