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You're free to hate both the player and the game when it comes to patent litigation, but one thing you can't do is sit on the sidelines and hope the competition plays out fairly. Google knows this, hence the mad rush to shore up its Android defense by stuffing its patent portfolio to the brim. First came the Motorola acquisition, and now Google went and cut a check to IBM in exchange for over 1,000 patents.
According to Bloomberg, Google added another 1,023 IBM patents to its portfolio, which come in addition to the 1,030 it acquired from Big Blue just two months ago. The $12.5 billion Motorola acquisition gave Google access to more than 17,000 patents, so within the last couple of months, Google has collected around 20,000 patents in this high stakes game of mobile roulette.
"Like many tech companies, at times we'll acquire patents that are relevant to our business," a Google spokesman said in a statement, according to The Wall Street Journal.
With almost $40 billion in cash, Google can certainly afford to play the patent game, which includes giving some of them away to hardware partners. Bloomberg says Google transferred nine patents to HTC last month, all of which were purchased in the past year, so that HTC could better defend itself against Apple.
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Thaoden
September 15, 2011 at 5:45pm
@budgetperson in memory system 0 counts as a location so it only gos from 0-1023 so it is 2^10
Budgetperson
September 15, 2011 at 3:02pm
Couldn't they have gotten just one more patent so they would get 1024 (2^10)? But besides that, this should be interesting.
kixofmyg0t
September 15, 2011 at 12:04pm
This is in addition to the some 1k they bought this past summer and the 17,000+ they're getting from buying Motorola.
I'm investing in Motorola.....
