The money's not gone, it's mostly just transferred from one party to another -- in this case, from Google to Motorola's shareholders. Of course, many man-hours are wasted in the legal wrangles, but it certainly doesn't add up to $20 billion dollars of lost productivity.

You can say that about practically any transfer payment. The cost of a transfer payment is opportunity cost. If Google invested 20 billion dollars in R&D, we'd have 20 billion dollars of R&D done in addition to someone, somewhere, having that 20 billion dollars to spend again.

Google bought a lot more than just patents.

The worst thing is that Google is now invested in the problem by $20 billion more than it was previously. The more invested U.S. companies become in patents, the more difficult it becomes to make change.

$20 billion? Did I miss a vital piece of news?

$12.5 billions for Moto, $4.5 billions for Nortel, that's actually more like 17 billions.