Judge: Google owes patent troll a 1.36% cut of AdWords' BEELLIONS Patent-holding company Vringo has won a legal victory against Google that could net it hundreds of millions of dollars per year in ongoing royalties from the Chocolate Factory's AdWords online advertising system. According to court documents [PDF] obtained by The Register, Judge Raymond Jackson of the US District Court of the …
Indeed, I love seeing a bit of fight back from the little-man too. Unfortunately, I read the following about Vringo:
Shares outstanding: 84,125,738
Price per share: $4.790
From: http://studio-5.financialcontent.com/investplace/quote?Symbol=VRNG#.UuoJoRB_uGc
If I read that right, it would make Vringo worth $402,962,285, not exactly a small company. Now had the patent belonged to Gary who lived in a three bedroom terrace in the center of Sheffield, THAT would have really made me cheer!
As it is, perhaps Vringo is more like Gulliver's little sister who just kicked him in the gonads, rather than a Lilliputian stabbing with a knitting needle sized spear while attempting to balance on Gulliver's left eyebrow! But even so, way to go sis!
"Indeed, I love seeing a bit of fight back from the little-man too."
Actually that isn't really the sentiment I have, it's more of a case of "well played". Even though I think patents are a particularly stupid waste of everyone's time and resources, I still appreciate the skill involved in hi-jacking someone else's revenue stream. Same goes for Microsoft's taxation of Android. It's a neat trick being able to impose a tax on your competitors ! :)
"Even though I think patents are a particularly stupid waste of everyone's time and resources"
Without them no little man with a big idea would ever earn what he deserves for his work.
Without them, medical research would slow to a crawl, as would many other fields: Why spend millions in research when you can wait for someone else to and steal their ideas?
Patents are a crucial part of our development as a species. Don't confuse the litigatious nature of large companies and trolls or the poor approval process taint your view of them.
Software patents are very different to medical research patents. Medical research patents are there to protect the millions spent on researching drugs and medical techniques. That company has no incentive to do so if it is not able to reap exclusive benefits to that. Software patents do not require millions to be spent in order to patent an idea. And as Apple has proven time and time again, it doesn't stop a company from patenting a common idea that already exists just to make it more difficult for it's competitors. Software patents do nothing but hamper innovation and hurt consumers.
"Microsoft's taxation of Android"
Microsoft's "taxation" of Android is based in legitimate invention of an actual thing that Google has no issue paying. Microsoft have been making smartphone software since before Google even existed - huge difference.
You really need to go and look again at the MS tax on Android.
Its commonly beleived to be on the transfer of files etc when connected to a computer and is a PC software patent and not a mobile one.
Also Google arn't paying it, phone makers like HTC are so again fail.....
Oh and a software protocol is not a thing as a thing is something that can be touched / handled etc.
Laugh if you want, but ask yourself where does the money come from ultimately? That's right, us consumers.
Laughing now?
Google's advertising blackmail system means that everything we buy costs a little bit more than it should. These days you pretty much have to advertise on Google or go out of business. Every advertising trick that Google develops means having to buy it or see your competitors get your customers. And that cost is passed on to us.
I buy things and stuff. I've never seen the things I buy advertised on Google. (Having said that, I use AdBlock and don't pay attention to webverts.) Are you saying that the majority of people won't buy anything they need/want unless it's advertised on Google?
@frank ly,
"I buy things and stuff. I've never seen the things I buy advertised on Google. (Having said that, I use AdBlock and don't pay attention to webverts.) Are you saying that the majority of people won't buy anything they need/want unless it's advertised on Google?"
The price of goods you buy incorporates the cost of advertising it on Google. Just because you've not looked at the ad on Google doesn't mean that you're not paying for it. Every time Google invent yet another irritating way of advertising stuff, the manufacturers have to buy those ads too (or fear losing ground on their competitors), and they pass the cost on to you whether or not you've seen the ad. AdBlock does not make your groceries and tech cheaper.
"Laugh if you want, but ask yourself where does the money come from ultimately? That's right, us consumers. Laughing now?"
That's not as insightful you think it is. I have many times said that Google's business is based on extortion; here's what I said on a thread here two days ago: "Google siphons off $50 billion a year from the economy, they create nothing and destroy quite a bit, and the pay that their parasite-employees get has raised the cost of living to the point where people are beginning to take direct action." And I have excoriated Google here many many times for the harm they do to others by their refusal to recognize anyone's IP rights but their own. I won't even go into their funding of counterfeit drug sites, their funding of pirate software, music, and film sites, etc etc.
Whether it's producers or consumers, Google harms them all.
What might have been nice would have been if, instead of pointing out the obvious, you had mentioned a solution. However, the only solution would seem to be legislative...
What is the definition of a troll?
I believe it is a myth about creatures that live underbridges and either eat passers by or charge them for allowng them to use said bridge. And a search engine being a bridge...
Not that I have any objections to any of it.
It all seems to be toddling along nicely as far as I can see.
@turtle, I'd like some of what you're smoking. I don't know if you're referring to the AdWords and other advertisement revenue as extortion? I, myself, have benefited greatly from Google advertising. For my work, it's an incredible value costing an order of magnitude less and being far more effective. I have also used Craigslist and while you cannot beat the price, Google sends me dozens for each person I get from CL. Bing and Yahoo are probably great too but their pricing didn't fit my business.
I'm sure there are businesses for whom Google ads are less effective, but if Google weren't generally effective, no one would use them. Believe me, I have zero loyalty. If a new order-of-magnitude better solution appeared, I'd try hard to be the first to switch.
To say nothing of all the other benefits I get from Google, beginning with their search which IMNSHO is superior to all others. I'm also quite pleased with my $200 moto G and with KitKat. Maps. Etc.
"I don't think even Adblock can save you from having an ad play before you see the video you want."
Guess again.
First time I saw a video ad play on Youtube was about a year after they'd introduced introduced them whilst trying to watch something on a friend's computer. Spent a good twenty minutes trying to figure out if she'd installed some dodgy search toolbar or other crapware that was causing it since "Youtube doesn't have adverts".
Yep, that's exactly how patents work. They can and do cover outcomes/effects/results as well as processes. If you re-engineer someone else's process to produce a result that's covered by their patent - you're still violating that patent.
Patents aren't about "not copying technology", they're about "giving inventors a window of opportunity to profit from their bright idea". How effective, or proportionate, they are in this aim is open to (lots and lots of) debate.
I know that it was a joke, but I disagree with you. I was late to Google because of its stupid name, and really needed beating with the cluestick before I accepted that it really was the best search engine out there. My use of Copernic ended the day that I was shown that the most relevant articles were found more efficiently and much more quickly by Google than Copernic - evidence-based decision making rules!
And I still think Google is a stupid name ...
This type of thing really needs to stop, and that does not depend on whether you like or hate Google, Microsoft, Apple, or one of the more egregiously victimized RIM, to name a few. I have contended for years that a programmer who does not infringe at least a patent a day should be fired for idleness. Software patents need to be killed and a stake driven through their hearts. Increasingly I find it difficult to sympathize with any patents at all, as most of them impede progress as much as they promote it.
The old tradeoff of monopoly in exchange for disclosure is pretty much totally broken in the case of software patents, and in the US, at least, a great deal of the remaining patents are bought in large part with taxpayers' money in the form of research grants. Even in the drug business, so often the favorite rationalization of patent proponents, the advances often are marginal, the games the drug corps play to extend them and suppress competition are close enough to racketeering in their structure as to make the distinction difficult.
But you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Without the incentive to invent, you're not likely to see many inventions. Even the greatest works of art had incentives behind them: most were commissions.
And don't diss the drug companies. Just about every patent they take out is a gamble, and few of them pay off, yet without them, we're likely to look at a day where medical tech will head back to the bad ol' days as germs/virii/whatever adapt beyond them.
As for software patents, they wouldn't be such an investment if they didn't have such a long term attached to them. Cut nonphysical patents down to about 3 years and they won't be worth investing speculatively anymore.
I have major issue with that comment about drug companies. Its nonsense! There have been very few new drugs in the last 30 or so years, compared with the preceding 30 years. Most drugs and their patents are what get referred to as 'me-too drugs', as they take a patented drug and copy it but with minor differences, and then test it and try to come up with some form of excuse to say its in some way better when in reality, if you did the tests properly it would do nothing differently.
So, yes, diss the drug companies as much as you want.
Most breakthrough medicine has come from public institutions such as universities. But often to get it to market, they sell the rights to one of the big drugs companies.
I don't think that's fair.
New or improved drugs /have/ been developed in recent years, in spite of greatly increased regulatory costs and increasing difficulty. (The difficulty is increasing because the bar is raised. And the lowest hanging fruit has already taken.)
Many of the 'me too' drugs you mention are because of the large amount of research - a seminal discovery is published and multiple pharmaceutical companies use that as a starting point, investing the next 10 years and 1.3 billion dollars developing what turn out to be similar compounds.
Publically funded research is important, certainly. But there's a reason the rights get sold off. It would be entirely possible to develop drugs all the way to market in a nationally owned organisation - you would just need to fund it appropriately.
"Without the incentive to invent, you're not likely to see many inventions."
If that was true we would still be banging rocks together instead of exchanging messages via t'internets. The fact is there are some powerful incentives that exist independently of patents, e.g.: survival in a hostile environment.
"Even the greatest works of art had incentives behind them: most were commissions."
Getting paid to do a job is hardly news, believe it or not that happens without patents too...
If that was true we would still be banging rocks together instead of exchanging messages via t'internets. The fact is there are some powerful incentives that exist independently of patents, e.g.: survival in a hostile environment.
ONLY in a hostile environment. Take that away (by being in a modern civilization), and you need a new incentive. Money works, but that is too easy to lose if you're prone to copycats.
Getting paid to do a job is hardly news, believe it or not that happens without patents too...
Name one invention that was commissioned but not patented. Most of the things I referred were unique works subject to copyright, but you can't copyright a technique.
One's an exception to the rile. The difference engine was commissioned by the Crown, thus making the work property of the Crown and subject to different rules.
The other breaks the rule. The analytical engine was never commissioned at all and has never actually been constructed to completion. Thus there was nothing to patent.
So what about anything from a private party?
"One's an exception to the rile. The difference engine was commissioned by the Crown, thus making the work property of the Crown and subject to different rules."
That doesn't change the fact that I named at least one work that was commissioned and the discoveries were not patented. I guess you don't do "gracious in defeat". ;)
"The analytical engine was never commissioned at all and has never actually been constructed to completion. Thus there was nothing to patent."
In case you haven't noticed Patents don't require that the invention be "constructed to completion". If you disagree with that policy you should lobby some politicians to see if you can get them to change the relevant laws.
It wasn't patented only because it COULDN'T be patented. Exception to the rule because it's inapplicable; edge case. A proper example would be one that COULD be patented but WASN'T.
And last I checked, yes, to say you don't want nonphysical patents means an examplar (and to be an exemplar, it usually has to be WORKING) is REQUIRED.
A discovery, a scientific theory or a mathematical method;
An aesthetic creation;
A scheme, rule or method for performing a mental act, playing a game or doing business, or a computer program; or
The presentation of information.
http://www.patentsoffice.ie/en/patents_excluded.aspx
Patents must be novel, have industrial applicability, and an inventive step.
This covers basically the EU and most of the world....
...then we have the US
So you claim pharma's of racketeering, but as GSK alone, spend about $6 BILLION a YEAR on research, if they don't patent it, how the fuck are they supposed to survive, when some dodgy pill factory nicks their formula and sells it for a few pence?
Ban patents, forget expensive innovation.
GSK* also spend at least that much on marketing, trying to persuade doctors to prescribe medications that have been inadequately trialled.If you haven't read "Bad Pharma" by Ben Goldacre yet, then it should be right at the top of your reading list (that goes for anyone else that uses health-care - you need to know just how broken the clinical trials system is).
*I'm not singling GSK out as being the only bent drugs company - they all are. I'm just responding to your comment.
First to market maybe?
We may draw our own conclusions as to whether paying competitors not to make generics after patent expiry bears a similarity to racketeering. It is not entirely clear which party would bear a greater share of blame, but it is entirely clear that the losers are those who might benefit from the drugs at issue.
Perhaps I am a little slow or something, but have you READ any of that patent? From the abstract:
"The search engine system also employs a collaborative/content-based filter to make continuing searches for information entities which match existing wire queries and are ranked and stored over time in user-accessible, system wires corresponding to the respective queries."
WTF does that mean???! Perhaps I've worked in the wrong area, but in 15 years in the IT industry I have never even heard of wire queries and system wires, at least not in this context! I presume their not talking about that which connects my headphones to my laptop?!
Just get richer.
Another couple of Caribbean Islands bought up by the the execs of investment firms bankrolling patent trolls. Ok, so the Chocolate Factory got rapped - good news. Who pays ? The customer = us
Did it make the world a better place ?
I'm not against patents per se, but the current system is madness and really just a nice way for lawyers to earn enough to compete with the investment firms income :-)
Round and round we go.
on the other hand, if Google just bought Vringo, with a lock-in clause for say two years in all existing management, then just decided to move their offices to under a bridge, an appropriate place for a troll after all, and make them all spend their days writing out "i must not try to make money off the back of other people's innovation to which I contributed f* all".
Ultimately i don't think any patent should carry on under such circumstances. If you or a a company invents something and uses that invention then the patent stands, if the patent is ever sold it should only stand if the buyer also uses the patent to make something saleable, otherwise it should be discarded.
That way, inventors and investors get their protections but the industry surrounding patents goes away.
Does it really need to be for a financial reward? Me thinks we would still be running around in animal skins beating each other over the heads with clubs if it wasn't for the real inventors who do it because they just can.
I hope that our future generations can throw off the shackles (yes I mean money) which really is created by large institutions and drag our sorry world into a better future for everyone.
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