Google has purchased more than 1,000 patents from IBM in an effort to build up its intellectual property portfolio and possibly with an eye to fending off the increasing number of IP lawsuits the search giant faces from competitors such as Microsoft. The new purchase boosts Google’s intellectual property portfolio which currently has just 700 patents and the loss of Nortel patents was a big blow to Google as the search engine was willing to pay any price to beef up its bank of patents. IBM has just enough patents to give Google some ammunition to fend off lawsuits and Google can buy enough patents to put the lawsuit genie back in the bottle………….
Google has purchased technology patents from International Business Machines (IBM) as the Web-search giant stocks up on intellectual property to defend itself against lawsuits. “Like many tech companies, at times we’ll acquire patents that are relevant to our business,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. The purchase was reported earlier by the blog SEO by the Sea, which said Google in mid-July recorded the acquisition of more than 1,000 patents with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patents involve the fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips, computer architecture including servers and routers and online search engines, among other things. SEO stands for search engine optimization or the practice of structuring websites and content so they rank well on search engines like Google. The Google spokesman declined to comment on the purchase price. It wasn’t immediately clear which of the patents might be useful to Google to shield against lawsuits. Google faces patent lawsuits for many of its services, including its Android mobile-device operating system, which has become a bigger target as its world-wide popularity has risen. It is unclear whether any current lawsuits pose a threat to future revenue generated by Google’s new technologies. Google has nearly $40 billion in cash, giving it the flexibility to make purchases. But it was outbid earlier this month when a coalition of companies that compete with Android, including Apple and Microsoft, agreed to buy a portfolio of some 6,000 patents owned by Nortel Networks Corp. for $4.5 billion. That price was five times the $900 million Google had initially offered in an early bid for the patents. Google, of Mountain View, Calif., has been in talks to buy InterDigital Inc., a company that owns thousands of patents and licenses them but doesn’t create products, people familiar with the matter have said. Such an acquisition would cost several billion dollars.
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