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A comment on Balls. Parent comment

Re:Balls by int3 on Tuesday August 16, 2011 @02:02AM (#2890075)
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.
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Re:Balls by philwelch on Tuesday August 16, 2011 @02:15AM (#2890103)
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.
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Re:Balls by Confusion on Tuesday August 16, 2011 @03:40AM (#2890260)
Google bought a lot more than just patents.
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Re:Balls by ryanhuff on Tuesday August 16, 2011 @03:27AM (#2890233)
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.
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