Note that Google hasn't committed to not be litigious with most of it's good patents. They've signed their patent pledge for a very limited scope of patents which looks good for PR purposes.
Bear in mind, patent extortion tends to look good as a business model once your main revenue source is starting to wane. So while Google may be behaving with patents today, they've been amassing a pretty large library... and the advertising market is expected to start going downhill fast.
It's hard to get an accurate number on how many patents Google owns (Google's search results are unhelpful, I'm sure they know, but they aren't sharing), but considering they picked up 17,000 from the Motorola acquisition alone, we can assume safely that Google is reserving the right to be a patent troll.
"Note that Google hasn't committed to not be litigious with most of it's good patents.'
Google has released 4000+ open source projects[1] under the apache license, which has a pretty broad patent grant, something you seem to be completely ignoring.
This includes things like tensorflow, the maps geometry library, etc.
I'm not sure what you consider "the good patents", but for most developers, it's the stuff we open source.
[1] This is just the 30 day active number, the total number over the 11 years i've been at Google is closer to 12k, last i looked.
Why are you addressing a hypothetical theory that has absolutely no basis? Why not address a real issue like Microsoft extorting Billions from Android OEM's for their obsolete, junk filled prior art ridden patents?
The most of the world doesn't have them in a first place, so no need to ban anything. It is just that USA is so horribly protective nation, that rest of us have to deal with this as well. E.g. want to sell your NZ stuff in states? Well, better to pay some protection money then.
gcp|9 years ago
ocdtrekkie|9 years ago
Bear in mind, patent extortion tends to look good as a business model once your main revenue source is starting to wane. So while Google may be behaving with patents today, they've been amassing a pretty large library... and the advertising market is expected to start going downhill fast.
Google has pledged not to abuse 245 patents: http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/patents/
It's hard to get an accurate number on how many patents Google owns (Google's search results are unhelpful, I'm sure they know, but they aren't sharing), but considering they picked up 17,000 from the Motorola acquisition alone, we can assume safely that Google is reserving the right to be a patent troll.
DannyBee|9 years ago
Google has released 4000+ open source projects[1] under the apache license, which has a pretty broad patent grant, something you seem to be completely ignoring.
This includes things like tensorflow, the maps geometry library, etc.
I'm not sure what you consider "the good patents", but for most developers, it's the stuff we open source.
[1] This is just the 30 day active number, the total number over the 11 years i've been at Google is closer to 12k, last i looked.
mcintyre1994|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
bitmapbrother|9 years ago
djsumdog|9 years ago
bungle|9 years ago
keithnz|9 years ago
http://www.ajpark.com/ip-central/news-articles/2016/05/new-z...