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.'"
Oh yay, the shills are back (Score:5, Informative)
High UID brand new account, anti-Google, pro-Microsoft, long first post, no other posting history shill is back again.
I guess Microsoft started paying for their subscription to Fuckface & Wankhead or whatever that PR agency is called.
Or maybe Florian Mueller is doing a bit of shilling on the side now that the mainstream press seems to have finally realised he's wrong about just about everything since 99% of the patent claims against Android would successfully win against Android, and, er, didn't. Hard times to be a shill I guess now that the world has woken up to the FUD.
Re:I'm tired of Google's power grab (Score:4, Informative)
This discussion thread was about the accusation that Google is "the web's LARGEST PRIVACY VIOLATION" and that we "SUPPORT THEM?"
Google is a pioneer of techniques, a number of them patented, which allow them to hold data about you whilst ensuring that it is anonymized even to their own employees, let alone to outside advertising agencies.
Facebook, on the other hand, directly shares your full profile including your PII with it's partners in advertising and apps. That clearly makes them a larger "PRIVACY VIOLATION" than Google and makes them 100% on topic in this particular thread which has, for some reason, been voted up extremely high.
I wonder if the reason that Facebook vilolates privacy so much more strongly than Google is because they fear Google's patents? That would be strange when Google never initiated patent action against anyone yet. Maybe it's because that's a missing element in Microsoft's portfolio and that's what attracted Microsoft to invest so heavily in Facebook? Do you think Google's increasing patent portfolio will increase or decrease privacy on the internet?