Tweet this: @PGopalan: #Google, #Motorola and the IP Stupidity http://wp.me/pXBON-2PV #patent click here
While the pundits will debate about why Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5B, a 63% premium over what Motorola was trading, and what Google will do with it, one thing is clear – Google wanted the IP, so it doesn’t get sued by its competitors.
Isn’t it time to reflect on the patent system itself? I have my own personal experience with the patent regime and I know intimately what a ridiculous idea it is – patenting obvious ideas in emerging fields. I have 6 patents issued by the USPTO while I was working at IBM. I was on an IBM patent board and with a team examined somewhere in the ball park of 1,000 internal submissions for a period of 4 years. So I speak from a little experience.
First, a must read on the topic is Lawrence Lessig’s essay The Problem With Patents, published in 1999. It is hard to make a case against patents better than that. The first paragraph alone, quoted below is worth framing:
“A patent is a form of regulation. It is a government-granted monopoly – an exclusive right backed by the power of the state. This monopoly is granted by a bureaucrat – a well-meaning, hardworking bureaucrat no doubt, but a bureaucrat nonetheless. This government employee decides whether an idea is novel, useful and nonobvious. If it is, the government guarantees the inventor an exclusive right to the idea for 20 years. Last year, some 150,000 such exclusive rights were granted, up one-third from the year before.”
Just because you had the time to think the obvious idea and turned your application in, got it examined by someone who most likely understands very little about the subject or its obviousness, doesn’t mean you have the right to tax everyone or monopolize its use or obstruct someone that figured out the idea as obvious.
And there is the whole subject of who owns the idea. Ideas, at least in mobile technology or the Internet, don’t erupt when you are sitting under a Bodhi tree – as illuminating and inspiring the story of the Budha might be to you. The myth of the lone genius ‘inventing’ stuff is plain humbug. Steve Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From and Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants illustrate it nicely. (check out this Wired magazine interview)
The last point on this is what a litigious country America has become. It affects our prosperity directly. Steve Magee, an economics professor at UT Austin (he also taught microeconomics to my MBA class) has a theory about The Optimum Number of Lawyers and their impact on GDP.
The Google acquisition is an outstanding example supporting his observation. Because overnight, Motorola Mobility couldn’t have created 63% more value without producing anything more than what it had already done. That $12.5B could have been used to create value in so many ways. Alas, it went somewhere else – “the people”, as Mitt Romney would say. One example of “people” is Sanjay Jha, the CEO of Motorola. He will make $90M off the deal. What new/extra value did he create? (more than the PhDs that went about submitting the obvious). But executive compensation in corporate America is a topic for another day.
– Prabhakar Gopalan
(also cross posted at http://prabhakar.me)
Tweet this: @PGopalan: #Google, #Motorola and the IP Stupidity http://wp.me/pXBON-2PV #patent click here