Patent dowry

Patents, that are originally meant to promote innovation and protect investments, has become a strategical asset in the game of alliances. For Google it has become an urgent matter to strengthen the Android ecosystem with a patent portfolio, not innovations. I guess it is important to the Android partners that they are "protected" by patents. Not necessarily things they have invented. Just any patents that can be used in the war against the other players.

Google providing a patent portfolio is merely a dowry to make the Android ecosystem attractive and protect it's inhabitants. Innovation has become a minor variable in the equation. Innovating mostly pays off in lawsuits these days, because there is always someone who has bought or patented something the innovation resembles. The genius working alone that need to protect her or his ideas is a myth. Innovation happens in teams and cooperation with other entities, and is mostly empiric.

What really happens now is patents are collected in portfolios and presented as a deck, either to be attractive or frightening. Entities are forced to join conglomerates and consortiums in search of protection. If this game is allowed to proceed any longer it will be hard, and even impossible to enter the market. An idea that competes with the existing products will not have a chance. Innovation and the free market suffers. More or less willingly cartels are born through consolidation as a result of the patent wars.

Apple is already in bed with media industry, network providers, so we already have conglomerate of corporations controlling a large part of media consumption. Now with Google buying Motorola hardware a manufacturer is the same entity controlling the largest switch (search engine) of the Internet. These entities become very powerful. As long as they behave nicely, this is not a serious problem. But this system is vulnerable in two ways. First, how can such powerful entities restrict themselves so that this power is not misused? Secondly they have a soft underbelly, as they will probably be investigated in terms of antitrust. But governments have recently become very interested in how the Internet and electronic communications can be surveilled and even controlled.

Will governments regulate or exploit the opportunity? As long as the patent war proceeds, the conglomerates will not dissolve. It is their survival strategy. But it undermines the original design of the Internet with distributed control. It does not matter if the Internet is technically controlled in a distributed manner, when the information flow is centralized.

The situation will then resemble some of the pre antitrust cases in the information technology industry. But this time it is driven by patents.

To begin with, selling and buying patents should not be allowed as this fuels the patent war. But I guess it is much more complicated to fix this problem now than ever. Big patent owners will not like the idea of their patent portfolio, expensively procured, should only be used to protect innovative ideas for a short period of time.

PS! I listened to the JavaPosse #360 Newscast while writing this. It has some interesting points about these issues, recorded almost a week before Google buying Motorola, and as such is free of speculations over why.

Further reading
Patents, Schmatents!