According to David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Google, there are over 250,000 patents covering the smartphone stuffed in your pocket right now. That sort of bloated figure is due to the ease at which companies can get patents for any vaguely worded document they mail to the United States Patent Office. Recently there was an auction held for Nortel’s collection of over 6,000 patents and many thought Google would get them because their current lack of patents is making them vulnerable to lawsuits from damn near everyone in the mobile industry. Sadly, they lost to a consortium of companies that include Apple and Microsoft. Their winning bid measured $4.5 billion, the largest sum of money ever spent on intellectual property. Because of this, along with Microsoft’s harassment of companies making Android smartphones, and HTC’s troubles with Apple, Google wrote up a blog post that amounts to a “the shit happening to us is totally not cool, man” plea for patent reform.
Why should you care about any of this? Because any time Google tries to do something novel, and admittedly Android is just iOS, but with a few interface tweaks, there’s a chance that they’ll end up in a court battle, and that slows down progress. If you’ve got an hour to kill, then we highly recommend you listen to episode 441 of the “This American Life” podcast, which runs through the current state of the patent system in America. It includes interviews with software developers, who themselves admit that the system is broken, and the most apt metaphor for patents that you’ll see being used by many technology publications. They call it an “arms race”, similar to the one America and Russia had during the Cold War. Companies building up vast reserves of patents, spending money that could have otherwise been poured into research and development, just to avoid litigation.
It’s all a real bummer.