Apple and Google Joining Forces On Kodak Patents Bid 97
TrueSatan writes "Bloomberg reports that Apple and Google have partnered to make a bid of more than $500 million for the Kodak patent portfolio. The bid relates to Kodak's 1,100 imaging patents. 'Kodak obtained commitments for $830 million exit financing last month, contingent on its sale of the digital imaging patents for at least $500 million.' This is likely to be an opening bid, with the final figure being far larger. By comparison, a group including Apple, Microsoft, and RIM bought Nortel's 6000+ patents for $4.5 billion last year. 'Google lost the auction for those patents after making an initial offer of $900 million.'"
Imagine (Score:5, Interesting)
The original idea was different (Score:3, Interesting)
As everything else that turned evil (Big Brother, Apartheid, international law, stocks), the original idea was dutch. Octroois were designed to make a design public, registered to the owner, so others could implement it AND pay for it. The idea was NOT to give a company a monopoly on an idea, the goal was the EXACT opposite. That the idea of ONE man could be used by anyone BUT they had to pay for it.
It started because people invented novel ways for water management were it was obvious the ideas belonged to one person but were of use to everyone, so it made sense to allow everyone to implement a new pump yet still reward the original inventor. It was the FRAND idea taken even further and core to the system.
This system ALSO insured something else, an octrooi HAD to be a real design. After all, the idea of pumping water was hardly new. You would ONLY play to use a new octrooi if it gave you the full design to build a new pump. Patents ARE supposed to be the same, a patent application should include all the details needed for a master in the craft to build the item. You CANNOT patent merely an idea or a business plan because there is nothing there that a CRAFTSMAN (NOT AN INVENTOR) can use to build. Collect all the patents related to the internal combustion engine, and you can build one. Collect the patents on a Apple patent, and you can build nothing but a legal case in a bought court.
It doesn't mean ALL patents are useless but a lot are. There is also a practice as done by Lego of patenting EVERYTHING you can think off just to stop someone else from doing anything. Lego made claims for all the alternative ideas they could think of to make building blocks so nobody could make anything even remotely similar. That there are patents for eternal motion machines should tell you enough, how can a craftsman skilled in the trade possibly make an eternal motion machine? Patents don't even have to work, so why not patent all your failed research just to prevent someone else from making it work?
The entire patent system lost its original goal. It was designed to SPREAD inventions while the original inventor was compensated and instead is used to limit the spread of inventions, stifle new invenstions and keep the rich rich.
But hey, good luck getting it to change. When you do, why not reform wallstreet at the same time to get the stock market to be about investment instead of speculation again? Oh and that UN thing to be about peace rather then self interests? That would be nice to if you are out fixing the world.
Re:I'm tired of Google's power grab (Score:3, Interesting)
You did not refute a single one.
Have a look in the history of every article in the last year which matches the string "Google". You will find that either as first post, or very soon afterwards there is a post which puts up lines like "Google is the worst privacy violator" "Google has become worse than Microsoft" etc. etc. In response to those posts will be many posts which completely refute your points. This has been repeated so often it's not funny. I have even posted in some of those discussions myself. For us to repeat those discussions would be "redundant" and I would hate that.
One of the biggest and most common examples of these accusations of Google becoming 'just as bad' is that their buying up patents is a sign they will become just as bad as Microsoft, which is using stupid patents like the one on the FAT filesystem to attack smaller developers (have a look at this Slashdot discussion about TomTom for example [slashdot.org]). However, we have not yet seen any evidence of this. Google still hasn't sued any small developer companies. However, this is relevant to our topic of discussion because Google working with Apple is new.
Do you think that now that Google has teamed up with Apple it is a sign that they want to join Apple's attacks on competitors? Maybe instead you think that this is a sign that Apple has come to its senses and realised that Microsoft is still a threat to our chances of a standardised mixed computing environment where Google just wants that system to exist so they can continue to have a chance to provide search and advertising?