9 ms·

Twitter Pays $36 Million to Avoid IBM Patent Suit

93 points by svenkatesh 13y ago

antonius 13y ago
" According to the SEC document, Twitter now owns 956 patents — up from just nine before it filed its IPO in November." Twitter's been busy buying up patents with its' IPO capital by the looks of it.
raverbashing 13y ago
Ah good old IBM Yeah, 36Mi is not a lot to Twitter, but it's more fuel to the extortion racket Another reason to buy nothing from this company
- atmosx 13y ago
  Really? I wonder how many people could take medical care, buy food (mind goes to Africa), etc with that amount of money that apparently was given to a patent troll (IBM). Just sad. ps. Nothing against twitter, or IBM. They are just exploiting rules made by humans.
  - iends 13y ago
    Really? I wonder how many people's lives have been made better by technologies created, sold, and serviced by IBM.
    - jp_sc 13y ago
      Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust (And by Goodwin's law corollaries I've lost this debate)
      - iends 13y ago
        It's tragic that IBM built technology that helped enabled the death of large number of people. One thing the wikipedia page doesn't make clear was IBM aware of the atrocities? The article cites the 1933 census, but things in Germany didn't really heat up until Kristallnacht in 1938? Anyway, the point was, things are not always black and white. IBM has certainly done some bad things, but it has also had a tremendous positive impact on society, medicine, techology, etc easily; more than 36m.
        throwawayaway 13y ago
        http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/black.html http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/black.html From the author of the book of the same name.
        pessimizer 13y ago
        >The article cites the 1933 census, but things in Germany didn't really heat up until Kristallnacht in 1938? "As the Nazi war machine occupied successive nations of Europe, capitulation was followed by a census of the population of each subjugated nation, with an eye to the identification and isolation of Jews and Gypsies. These census operations were intimately intertwined with technology and cards supplied by IBM's German and new Polish subsidiaries, which were awarded specific sales territories in Poland by decision of the New York office following Germany's successful Blitzkrieg invasion."
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - duaneb 13y ago
    > They are just exploiting rules made by humans. This is capitalism. If you want a free market, you must live with unethical corporations.
    - dantheman 13y ago
      Free markets and patents are incompatible.
      - duaneb 13y ago
        Sure, but a free market is utopian. Nobody wants to live in a world where the free exchange of money takes highest precedence.
      - gress 13y ago
        True, but in a real free market monopolies and cartels quickly produce the same effect.
        JetSpiegel 13y ago
        In a real free market the cartels would be undercut by competitors not fixing their prices. You mean in a real-life market.
        gress 13y ago
        In practice the powerful would be able to restrict supply lines and access to market for upstart competitors using anticompetitive contracts, so those not in a cartel would simply wither.
        atmosx 13y ago
        Sure, and in communism there's no need to do even that, because the state provides and we're all happy 20-hours per-week workers. Every social movement has two sides: a theoretical and a real one. When studying. If we have to accept that China, Cuba and Stalin's Russia what applied Communism looks like, we have to accept for coherence and mainly because it seems to be the truth that what we're seeing (wall street, monopolies, free market not auto-regulating, etc) as applied Liberalism.
mrschwabe 13y ago
Interesting how the playing field changes when you reach a critical mass. Reforming patent law could be part of the solution against this type of thing, but the bigger problem may actually just be that IBM is run by assholes.
- webreac 13y ago
  We do not have the full story. Maybe 36M$ is very cheap for these 900 patents and IBM was very kind. We will probably not know before many years.
  - mildtrepidation 13y ago
    It's true that we don't have much in the way of details, but it's also very hard to imagine "very kind" fitting the bill here in any way, shape, or form. "We have a portfolio of patents that we are now going to use to sue you, unless you'd like to buy them" just does not qualify as "kind" to me regardless of the rest of the interaction. They had (and everyone has) the option to simply not file this kind of suit (or even go hog wild in the patent field). But they consistently choose to. I understand that it'd be fairly irresponsible for a large company to ignore patents, or to ignore actual, real infringement that affects its bottom line, but it is and has been blown so far out of proportion that no one in IBM's position gets a pass.
    - duaneb 13y ago
      > I understand that it'd be fairly irresponsible for a large company to ignore patents, or to ignore actual, real infringement that affects its bottom line Bingo. This is a corporate organization and your needs, or really anyone's needs but the company's, are not in its best interest to consider. From the perspective of profits, playing the patent ransom game is the best decision, especially for entrenched business giants like IBM.
- diegomcfly 13y ago
  Ding. Ding Ding. We have a winner. Creating / getting a patent at IBM is comical. Sort of like a game. All you have to do is document something, pass it to their patent lawyers ... and they fill it with so much verbose lawyer language and fluff that any normal person can't read and interpret it. Then it gets submitted and ... voila ... patent pending (and quite typically a couple years later, patented). (Source: Me, a former employee of IBM (Indian Business Machines)).
devx 13y ago
Thanks for making the world a worse place, Twitter, by giving in to the patent bullies, and setting an example for others. It's sort of "understandable" for small start-ups who would be ruined by the trial alone, but for companies that have billions of dollars in their coffers to do this is just plain pathetic and cowardly. Instead of fighting the problem, they become part of it and accomplices to it. This also completely devalues the credibility of their IPA [1] patent thing. If Twitter gave in, why would everyone else who might've been interested in the whole IPA thing not do the same, too? [1] - https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-innovators-patent-agreement https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-innovators-patent-...
- diegomcfly 13y ago
  You would not believe the silly obscure things that IBM patents. It is a disgusting game they play.
  - IBM 13y ago
    Post some of them.
    - diegomcfly 13y ago
      I prefer to stay out of the legal cross-hairs of Big Blue ... thanks.
- snorkel 13y ago
  Actually Twitter didn't just pay IBM, but bought the 900 patents from IBM outright, which hopefully Twitter will not then use offensively as IBM did, so this could be a good thing, and perhaps another way to deal with patent trolls: buy their arsenal leaving them with fewer extortion tools.
  - mcintyre1994 13y ago
    Twitter have a public agreement to use patents only defensively, so hopefully these won't be used offensively now. https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement
rhizome 13y ago
This is how companies become members of the exclusive club known as "entrenched interests." It would be interesting for a company to take an alternative route and threaten to go out of business, or, say, publicly announce that they can't implement certain features, because it would require them to purchase their freedom to do so. [Insert your own slavery metaphor here] However, now Twitter will have to say that their position on a given technical controversy is "complicated" and "nuanced" and imply that we rabble just don't understand the real world of business.
yeukhon 13y ago
Two questions: 1. If a developer co-own a patent with his former employer (IBM), does this developer have the right to use his patent technology later at Google? I don't know how IBM handles patents with his or her employees. 2. Developer does not own any patent but being the person who invented the technology does he have the right to invent a similar technology like his earlier invention at Google? People carry knowledge with them! Regarding #2, since I really have zero idea how companies handle patent (except patent filing process), I think maybe patents have something to do in this deal (http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-trail-steve-jobs-and-eric-schmidt-didnt-want-you-to-see http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-...). Maybe, maybe 1%.
- _delirium 13y ago
  On #1, the answer would be yes if they really did co-own it and had no other contract regulating terms of their co-ownership (unlikely). Under U.S. law (not true everywhere!), co-owners of a patent each have an independent right to exploit and/or non-exclusively license the patent, without consultation with the other co-owners, unless they've entered an agreement providing for other terms of co-ownership. This is also true for copyrights on jointly authored work, incidentally. However, companies usually just get the patent assigned to them by the employee, in return for some token compensation (varies, sometimes it's really token, like $1, other companies will pay employees $100-$1000 per patent). One place where it can sometimes come up is that a co-inventor who was omitted from the patent application can later try to get him/herself retroactively added. Trying to dig up such people, get them added, and then buy a license from that person is one strategy for defending a patent lawsuit. E.g. if IBM bought a patent from a university spinoff, you could try to dig up a grad student who can document he/she co-invented the relevant technology but wasn't listed on the patent, get them added, then license it from them. Since they now co-own the patent with IBM, you only need to license it from either them or IBM, so IBM's suit fails. I think doing this successfully is pretty rare, but there's a fairly famous case: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8929550350181055569 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8929550350181055...
- diegomcfly 13y ago
  1. No. Assumption being that any thing "invented" while working for IBM, belongs to IBM. The developer does not "own" it. He/she is only listed as basically the "(co)-inventer". He cannot go to Google and "use" it with out licensing / agreement from IBM. Now .. it is plausible that an employee invented something totally on their own time while an employee of IBM. That said, if this had any value (now or in the future), it is entirely likely and plausible that IBM could make a case legally for having rights to said invention. This is especially true if your "invention" is in the same domain you work in for IBM (e.g. if you are a middleware developer for IBM Software Group and you make a new type of messaging technology .. on "your own time" in the evening/weekends). 2. This is a grey area that will ALWAYS be open to legal interpretation (enter the lawyers). There are different things involved in your question: Are there non-competes in your employment contracts?, are they actually enforceable legally?, will they be enforced legally?, what specifically is the "technology"? So .. this is not possible to answer beyond just saying: It depends. It is case-by-case and is balance between an business' intellectual property, any contractual agreements (non-compete) you may have signed, and your right to work / find gainful employment.
us0r 13y ago
Not sure Twitter had a choice here. IBM is the largest recipient of patents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_patent_recipients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_paten...
- jakub_g 13y ago
  Interesting list, thanks for the link. Note it's steadily increasing each year, with nearly 18 patents per day in 2012. That's a crazy number for me.
  - us0r 13y ago
    And they have been exiting the hardware business.
- bluedevil2k 13y ago
  As someone who used to work at IBM and generated 36 patents for them, I can tell you that the incentives at IBM are HEAVILY in favor of patents at the expense of your "real" work. At IBM, you can bust your A## off all year, work 60 hours a week, and get a PBC rating of 1 (top 10%) and get rewarded with a bonus of 5% (if you're lucky). Or, you can slack off and spend the majority of your time ducking assignments, getting a PBC rating of 2 (middle 50%) and get rewarded with a 2% bonus, and using your work time to submit patents, where you get $1000 per patent. Which path would you choose? Is it any wonder they have so many patents submitted by their employees?
  - sk5t 13y ago
    I suppose it depends how many patents you can turn out annually... personally I would rather see my salary double each 14 years rather than in 36.
    - bluedevil2k 13y ago
      I said bonus, not raise. Your salary would never double at IBM unless you were one of the chosen few pegged for superstardom.
WildUtah 13y ago
First, Twitter didn't pay off IBM for trolling here. They outright bought a set of patents in the hope that Twitter's own new portfolio would be enough to discourage other companies from suing Twitter in the future. Defensive portfolios of garbage patents used to be the key to preventing competitors from suing you with their garbage patents. After the eBay v. MercExchange [0] case in 2006, it's not as dangerous to be sued but defensive portfolios are now much less useful also because you can't threaten to shut down aggressors' businesses with injunctions. The Apple v. Samsung and Microsoft v. Motorola cases also recently demonstrated that vague garbage patents are much more useful in court than technological patents. Juries and judges understand them better and are inclined to award hundreds of times more damages. Second, IBM is the least awful kind of patent troll. They generally ask for small fractions of revenue or investment in companies that have established themselves. The IPO phase is a favorite time for them to ask for a few million from growing companies. The worst kind of trolls -- such as Microsoft's Intellectual Ventures -- ask for much more money from companies and often go after startups. IBM exercises restraint with the idea that they might have an ongoing relationship with companies someday in some other context. And IBM, unlike most trolls, actually does real research. Most of the new ideas in Google Search were first published in an IBM research paper that Larry and Sergei read. IBM didn't patent those ideas, though; they mostly seem to accumulate scattershot patents at random. I think IBM's primary goal is to top the list of prolific grantees every year. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L.C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L.....
- josephlord 13y ago
  > The Apple v. Samsung and Microsoft v. Motorola cases also recently demonstrated that vague garbage patents are much more useful in court than technological patents. Juries and judges understand them better and are inclined to award hundreds of times more damages. I don't think that I agree with this part especially if you are equating Standards Essential Patents with "technological patents" and all other patents as "vague garbage patents". If that wasn't what you meant I misunderstood. The reason that SEP are worth less (than other valid patents) and not entitled to injunctions is because commitments were entered into by their owners to enable them to be included in the standard. And some SEPs are pretty low grade too and alternative approaches are often only prevented by the standard itself.
bluedevil2k 13y ago
There's a lot of guessing and conjecture about how IBM deals with patents, so I thought I'd write a new parent thread to discuss. I worked at IBM for 7 years, leaving many years ago. I am an IBM Master Inventor, having 36 patents filed with the USPTO with my name on them (some are still winding their way through the system). I worked heavily on patents for 3 years, and the last 2 years I was there, I was on the Patent Review Board. I'd also estimate during my active time with patents, I submitted 250-300 patent ideas to the board. The Patent Review Board is organized along technologies - so, mobile would have its own Patent Review Board. People on the Patent Review Board tend to be Master Inventors and others who are active in the patent process. Once a week, about 3-4 hours of presentations are made to the Board (which includes the patent lawyers as well). After a 5-10 minute presentation, they are asked to leave the room, and the Board votes whether it should continue to the lawyer, or whether to close it. Most obviously are closed at this step with prior art. If it's voted to go to the lawyers, in my background, there was a pretty good chance it was going to get filed. If your patent got filed with the USPTO, you got a point. IBM is very generous with their patent bonuses. You get $750 per patent filed. You also get an additional $1500 on your first patent filing, and $1500 every 3 after that. So, effectively, about $1000 per patent. Patent ideas could be anything and everything. If they could patent it, they would. I remember from my time on the board seeing ideas on everything from dog doors to server optimization techniques to music devices. Given the people who work at IBM, most tended to be tech related, but it definitely was not a requirement at all. The stuff people have asked about royalties makes me laugh as well - I never got the feeling once they cared if your patent would make them $1B or $1. And they certainly didn't care about compensating us for an idea that could make $1B. I was awarded the Software Group Patent of the Year one year, and other than an email denoting that fact, nothing was different than some of the lame ones I had filed. Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the patent process at IBM - it was one of the few outlets that rewarded creativity and hard work at the company.
- balls187 13y ago
  What you wrote underscores how the patent process is flawed. IBM abused the spirit of patents for their own financial gain.
guelo 13y ago
The bullshit patents that IBM threatened to sue Twitter over were for url shortening [1], inline user-customized advertising[2], and diff-ing contact lists[3]. [1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6,957,224.PN.&OS=PN/6,957,224&RS=PN/6,957,224 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H... [2] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,072,849.PN.&OS=PN/7,072,849&RS=PN/7,072,849 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H... [3] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,099,862.PN.&OS=PN/7,099,862&RS=PN/7,099,862 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
briantakita 13y ago
According to patents, innovation is property that you must pay the "innovator" to use. The innovator is someone who bought the property of the innovation. In most peoples' worlds, innovation describes the act to innovate. An act is not someone's property.
teddyh 13y ago
"OK," [IBM] said, [to Sun in the 1980s] "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?" After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list. Patently Absurd, Forbes, 2002: http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
ipValue 13y ago
The patents that Twitter bought from IBM were mostly low quality assets. IBM, largest patent holder for the last 21 years straight, is known for having tons of narrow patents on every little feature they develop. This deal was a good way for IBM to get rid of some garbage and a good way for Twitter to get a Big, Scary looking patent portfolio. I did a qualitative analysis of the patent portfolio here: http://www.preferredembodiment.com/1/post/2014/03/twitter-bought-ibms-junk-patents.html http://www.preferredembodiment.com/1/post/2014/03/twitter-bo...

93 points by svenkatesh 13y ago

" According to the SEC document, Twitter now owns 956 patents — up from just nine before it filed its IPO in November." Twitter's been busy buying up patents with its' IPO capital by the looks of it.

raverbashing 13y ago

Ah good old IBM Yeah, 36Mi is not a lot to Twitter, but it's more fuel to the extortion racket Another reason to buy nothing from this company

atmosx 13y ago
Really? I wonder how many people could take medical care, buy food (mind goes to Africa), etc with that amount of money that apparently was given to a patent troll (IBM). Just sad. ps. Nothing against twitter, or IBM. They are just exploiting rules made by humans.
- iends 13y ago
  Really? I wonder how many people's lives have been made better by technologies created, sold, and serviced by IBM.
  - jp_sc 13y ago
    Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust (And by Goodwin's law corollaries I've lost this debate)
    - iends 13y ago
      It's tragic that IBM built technology that helped enabled the death of large number of people. One thing the wikipedia page doesn't make clear was IBM aware of the atrocities? The article cites the 1933 census, but things in Germany didn't really heat up until Kristallnacht in 1938? Anyway, the point was, things are not always black and white. IBM has certainly done some bad things, but it has also had a tremendous positive impact on society, medicine, techology, etc easily; more than 36m.
      - throwawayaway 13y ago
        http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/black.html http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/black.html From the author of the book of the same name.
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        >The article cites the 1933 census, but things in Germany didn't really heat up until Kristallnacht in 1938? "As the Nazi war machine occupied successive nations of Europe, capitulation was followed by a census of the population of each subjugated nation, with an eye to the identification and isolation of Jews and Gypsies. These census operations were intimately intertwined with technology and cards supplied by IBM's German and new Polish subsidiaries, which were awarded specific sales territories in Poland by decision of the New York office following Germany's successful Blitzkrieg invasion."
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- duaneb 13y ago
  > They are just exploiting rules made by humans. This is capitalism. If you want a free market, you must live with unethical corporations.
  - dantheman 13y ago
    Free markets and patents are incompatible.
    - duaneb 13y ago
      Sure, but a free market is utopian. Nobody wants to live in a world where the free exchange of money takes highest precedence.
    - gress 13y ago
      True, but in a real free market monopolies and cartels quickly produce the same effect.
      - JetSpiegel 13y ago
        In a real free market the cartels would be undercut by competitors not fixing their prices. You mean in a real-life market.
        gress 13y ago
        In practice the powerful would be able to restrict supply lines and access to market for upstart competitors using anticompetitive contracts, so those not in a cartel would simply wither.
        atmosx 13y ago
        Sure, and in communism there's no need to do even that, because the state provides and we're all happy 20-hours per-week workers. Every social movement has two sides: a theoretical and a real one. When studying. If we have to accept that China, Cuba and Stalin's Russia what applied Communism looks like, we have to accept for coherence and mainly because it seems to be the truth that what we're seeing (wall street, monopolies, free market not auto-regulating, etc) as applied Liberalism.

mrschwabe 13y ago

Interesting how the playing field changes when you reach a critical mass. Reforming patent law could be part of the solution against this type of thing, but the bigger problem may actually just be that IBM is run by assholes.

webreac 13y ago
We do not have the full story. Maybe 36M$ is very cheap for these 900 patents and IBM was very kind. We will probably not know before many years.
- mildtrepidation 13y ago
  It's true that we don't have much in the way of details, but it's also very hard to imagine "very kind" fitting the bill here in any way, shape, or form. "We have a portfolio of patents that we are now going to use to sue you, unless you'd like to buy them" just does not qualify as "kind" to me regardless of the rest of the interaction. They had (and everyone has) the option to simply not file this kind of suit (or even go hog wild in the patent field). But they consistently choose to. I understand that it'd be fairly irresponsible for a large company to ignore patents, or to ignore actual, real infringement that affects its bottom line, but it is and has been blown so far out of proportion that no one in IBM's position gets a pass.
  - duaneb 13y ago
    > I understand that it'd be fairly irresponsible for a large company to ignore patents, or to ignore actual, real infringement that affects its bottom line Bingo. This is a corporate organization and your needs, or really anyone's needs but the company's, are not in its best interest to consider. From the perspective of profits, playing the patent ransom game is the best decision, especially for entrenched business giants like IBM.
diegomcfly 13y ago
Ding. Ding Ding. We have a winner. Creating / getting a patent at IBM is comical. Sort of like a game. All you have to do is document something, pass it to their patent lawyers ... and they fill it with so much verbose lawyer language and fluff that any normal person can't read and interpret it. Then it gets submitted and ... voila ... patent pending (and quite typically a couple years later, patented). (Source: Me, a former employee of IBM (Indian Business Machines)).

devx 13y ago

Thanks for making the world a worse place, Twitter, by giving in to the patent bullies, and setting an example for others. It's sort of "understandable" for small start-ups who would be ruined by the trial alone, but for companies that have billions of dollars in their coffers to do this is just plain pathetic and cowardly. Instead of fighting the problem, they become part of it and accomplices to it. This also completely devalues the credibility of their IPA [1] patent thing. If Twitter gave in, why would everyone else who might've been interested in the whole IPA thing not do the same, too? [1] - https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-innovators-patent-agreement https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-innovators-patent-...

diegomcfly 13y ago
You would not believe the silly obscure things that IBM patents. It is a disgusting game they play.
- IBM 13y ago
  Post some of them.
  - diegomcfly 13y ago
    I prefer to stay out of the legal cross-hairs of Big Blue ... thanks.
snorkel 13y ago
Actually Twitter didn't just pay IBM, but bought the 900 patents from IBM outright, which hopefully Twitter will not then use offensively as IBM did, so this could be a good thing, and perhaps another way to deal with patent trolls: buy their arsenal leaving them with fewer extortion tools.
- mcintyre1994 13y ago
  Twitter have a public agreement to use patents only defensively, so hopefully these won't be used offensively now. https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement

rhizome 13y ago

This is how companies become members of the exclusive club known as "entrenched interests." It would be interesting for a company to take an alternative route and threaten to go out of business, or, say, publicly announce that they can't implement certain features, because it would require them to purchase their freedom to do so. [Insert your own slavery metaphor here] However, now Twitter will have to say that their position on a given technical controversy is "complicated" and "nuanced" and imply that we rabble just don't understand the real world of business.

yeukhon 13y ago

Two questions: 1. If a developer co-own a patent with his former employer (IBM), does this developer have the right to use his patent technology later at Google? I don't know how IBM handles patents with his or her employees. 2. Developer does not own any patent but being the person who invented the technology does he have the right to invent a similar technology like his earlier invention at Google? People carry knowledge with them! Regarding #2, since I really have zero idea how companies handle patent (except patent filing process), I think maybe patents have something to do in this deal (http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-trail-steve-jobs-and-eric-schmidt-didnt-want-you-to-see http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-...). Maybe, maybe 1%.

_delirium 13y ago
On #1, the answer would be yes if they really did co-own it and had no other contract regulating terms of their co-ownership (unlikely). Under U.S. law (not true everywhere!), co-owners of a patent each have an independent right to exploit and/or non-exclusively license the patent, without consultation with the other co-owners, unless they've entered an agreement providing for other terms of co-ownership. This is also true for copyrights on jointly authored work, incidentally. However, companies usually just get the patent assigned to them by the employee, in return for some token compensation (varies, sometimes it's really token, like $1, other companies will pay employees $100-$1000 per patent). One place where it can sometimes come up is that a co-inventor who was omitted from the patent application can later try to get him/herself retroactively added. Trying to dig up such people, get them added, and then buy a license from that person is one strategy for defending a patent lawsuit. E.g. if IBM bought a patent from a university spinoff, you could try to dig up a grad student who can document he/she co-invented the relevant technology but wasn't listed on the patent, get them added, then license it from them. Since they now co-own the patent with IBM, you only need to license it from either them or IBM, so IBM's suit fails. I think doing this successfully is pretty rare, but there's a fairly famous case: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8929550350181055569 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8929550350181055...
diegomcfly 13y ago
1. No. Assumption being that any thing "invented" while working for IBM, belongs to IBM. The developer does not "own" it. He/she is only listed as basically the "(co)-inventer". He cannot go to Google and "use" it with out licensing / agreement from IBM. Now .. it is plausible that an employee invented something totally on their own time while an employee of IBM. That said, if this had any value (now or in the future), it is entirely likely and plausible that IBM could make a case legally for having rights to said invention. This is especially true if your "invention" is in the same domain you work in for IBM (e.g. if you are a middleware developer for IBM Software Group and you make a new type of messaging technology .. on "your own time" in the evening/weekends). 2. This is a grey area that will ALWAYS be open to legal interpretation (enter the lawyers). There are different things involved in your question: Are there non-competes in your employment contracts?, are they actually enforceable legally?, will they be enforced legally?, what specifically is the "technology"? So .. this is not possible to answer beyond just saying: It depends. It is case-by-case and is balance between an business' intellectual property, any contractual agreements (non-compete) you may have signed, and your right to work / find gainful employment.

us0r 13y ago

Not sure Twitter had a choice here. IBM is the largest recipient of patents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_patent_recipients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_paten...

jakub_g 13y ago
Interesting list, thanks for the link. Note it's steadily increasing each year, with nearly 18 patents per day in 2012. That's a crazy number for me.
- us0r 13y ago
  And they have been exiting the hardware business.
bluedevil2k 13y ago
As someone who used to work at IBM and generated 36 patents for them, I can tell you that the incentives at IBM are HEAVILY in favor of patents at the expense of your "real" work. At IBM, you can bust your A## off all year, work 60 hours a week, and get a PBC rating of 1 (top 10%) and get rewarded with a bonus of 5% (if you're lucky). Or, you can slack off and spend the majority of your time ducking assignments, getting a PBC rating of 2 (middle 50%) and get rewarded with a 2% bonus, and using your work time to submit patents, where you get $1000 per patent. Which path would you choose? Is it any wonder they have so many patents submitted by their employees?
- sk5t 13y ago
  I suppose it depends how many patents you can turn out annually... personally I would rather see my salary double each 14 years rather than in 36.
  - bluedevil2k 13y ago
    I said bonus, not raise. Your salary would never double at IBM unless you were one of the chosen few pegged for superstardom.

WildUtah 13y ago

First, Twitter didn't pay off IBM for trolling here. They outright bought a set of patents in the hope that Twitter's own new portfolio would be enough to discourage other companies from suing Twitter in the future. Defensive portfolios of garbage patents used to be the key to preventing competitors from suing you with their garbage patents. After the eBay v. MercExchange [0] case in 2006, it's not as dangerous to be sued but defensive portfolios are now much less useful also because you can't threaten to shut down aggressors' businesses with injunctions. The Apple v. Samsung and Microsoft v. Motorola cases also recently demonstrated that vague garbage patents are much more useful in court than technological patents. Juries and judges understand them better and are inclined to award hundreds of times more damages. Second, IBM is the least awful kind of patent troll. They generally ask for small fractions of revenue or investment in companies that have established themselves. The IPO phase is a favorite time for them to ask for a few million from growing companies. The worst kind of trolls -- such as Microsoft's Intellectual Ventures -- ask for much more money from companies and often go after startups. IBM exercises restraint with the idea that they might have an ongoing relationship with companies someday in some other context. And IBM, unlike most trolls, actually does real research. Most of the new ideas in Google Search were first published in an IBM research paper that Larry and Sergei read. IBM didn't patent those ideas, though; they mostly seem to accumulate scattershot patents at random. I think IBM's primary goal is to top the list of prolific grantees every year. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L.C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L.....

josephlord 13y ago
> The Apple v. Samsung and Microsoft v. Motorola cases also recently demonstrated that vague garbage patents are much more useful in court than technological patents. Juries and judges understand them better and are inclined to award hundreds of times more damages. I don't think that I agree with this part especially if you are equating Standards Essential Patents with "technological patents" and all other patents as "vague garbage patents". If that wasn't what you meant I misunderstood. The reason that SEP are worth less (than other valid patents) and not entitled to injunctions is because commitments were entered into by their owners to enable them to be included in the standard. And some SEPs are pretty low grade too and alternative approaches are often only prevented by the standard itself.

bluedevil2k 13y ago

There's a lot of guessing and conjecture about how IBM deals with patents, so I thought I'd write a new parent thread to discuss. I worked at IBM for 7 years, leaving many years ago. I am an IBM Master Inventor, having 36 patents filed with the USPTO with my name on them (some are still winding their way through the system). I worked heavily on patents for 3 years, and the last 2 years I was there, I was on the Patent Review Board. I'd also estimate during my active time with patents, I submitted 250-300 patent ideas to the board. The Patent Review Board is organized along technologies - so, mobile would have its own Patent Review Board. People on the Patent Review Board tend to be Master Inventors and others who are active in the patent process. Once a week, about 3-4 hours of presentations are made to the Board (which includes the patent lawyers as well). After a 5-10 minute presentation, they are asked to leave the room, and the Board votes whether it should continue to the lawyer, or whether to close it. Most obviously are closed at this step with prior art. If it's voted to go to the lawyers, in my background, there was a pretty good chance it was going to get filed. If your patent got filed with the USPTO, you got a point. IBM is very generous with their patent bonuses. You get $750 per patent filed. You also get an additional $1500 on your first patent filing, and $1500 every 3 after that. So, effectively, about $1000 per patent. Patent ideas could be anything and everything. If they could patent it, they would. I remember from my time on the board seeing ideas on everything from dog doors to server optimization techniques to music devices. Given the people who work at IBM, most tended to be tech related, but it definitely was not a requirement at all. The stuff people have asked about royalties makes me laugh as well - I never got the feeling once they cared if your patent would make them $1B or $1. And they certainly didn't care about compensating us for an idea that could make $1B. I was awarded the Software Group Patent of the Year one year, and other than an email denoting that fact, nothing was different than some of the lame ones I had filed. Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the patent process at IBM - it was one of the few outlets that rewarded creativity and hard work at the company.

balls187 13y ago
What you wrote underscores how the patent process is flawed. IBM abused the spirit of patents for their own financial gain.

guelo 13y ago

The bullshit patents that IBM threatened to sue Twitter over were for url shortening [1], inline user-customized advertising[2], and diff-ing contact lists[3]. [1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6,957,224.PN.&OS=PN/6,957,224&RS=PN/6,957,224 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H... [2] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,072,849.PN.&OS=PN/7,072,849&RS=PN/7,072,849 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H... [3] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,099,862.PN.&OS=PN/7,099,862&RS=PN/7,099,862 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

briantakita 13y ago

According to patents, innovation is property that you must pay the "innovator" to use. The innovator is someone who bought the property of the innovation. In most peoples' worlds, innovation describes the act to innovate. An act is not someone's property.

teddyh 13y ago

"OK," [IBM] said, [to Sun in the 1980s] "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?" After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list. Patently Absurd, Forbes, 2002: http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

ipValue 13y ago

The patents that Twitter bought from IBM were mostly low quality assets. IBM, largest patent holder for the last 21 years straight, is known for having tons of narrow patents on every little feature they develop. This deal was a good way for IBM to get rid of some garbage and a good way for Twitter to get a Big, Scary looking patent portfolio. I did a qualitative analysis of the patent portfolio here: http://www.preferredembodiment.com/1/post/2014/03/twitter-bought-ibms-junk-patents.html http://www.preferredembodiment.com/1/post/2014/03/twitter-bo...