Legal Geek No. 42: Google Becomes Biggest Patent Troll of All?

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we take a look at the latest stab for ending the patent troll problem, and whether Google is really just becoming the biggest of the patent trolls instead of solving the problem.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp42

In a week where the Supreme Court argues the issue of gay marriage and more race protests break out in major cities, of course Google goes and makes the most interesting patent story in months to steal this segment. Google announced the Patent Purchase Promotion this week, in which Google will offer to buy any patented intellectual property that an inventor or patent owner wants to sell.

Here's how it will work. From May 8 to May 22, interested sellers can submit what patent rights they seek to sell and an asking price into Google, and Google will decide after reviewing the offers what they will purchase by June 26. There is currently no clear marketplace for selling patent rights, so what Google is offering here is relatively innovative, while also being potentially scary.

Google is marketing this program as a way to slow the patent troll problem. Congress has struggled to find the right way to stop trollish patent enforcement activities, while also protecting the rights of legitimate inventors and investors who may need to defend rights in court even when they are not able to practice their inventions on a large scale. Google thinks that this program will allow patent sellers to sell to them and hopefully keep those same patent rights out of the hands of assertion entities, which are the trolls who buy patent rights just to threaten lawsuits later to extort settlements from many others.

Will that goal actually be achieved? Or is Google really becoming poised to be the biggest of the patent trolls? That's the open question.

Google will, as a publicly traded company, always be concerned about the bottom line. This patent purchase program will need to generate revenue or saved costs in some manner commensurate with the high expense Google will undertake to procure all these patent rights. That money could come from cheap licenses to many licensors, a de facto creative commons program for patents in the best case. Google may also treat some of these acquisitions as a way to avoid lost costs in paying its lawyers to defend lawsuits later if someone else buys rights relevant to their own products.

However, Google could just end up selling the rights later or taking others to court, much like the same patent assertion entities everyone complains about. Google is no stranger to patent lawsuits, having fought numerous battles over patents in the smartphone industry to protect the Android OS.

Bottom line - No single step will solve the patent troll problem for good, but Google is taking an interesting stab with this program. We can only hope Google is investing this money to make a better patent system rather than merely for strategic, or even worse, trolling reasons.

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