Retaining them defensively isn't "slightly better". Using them offensively is significantly worse.
"You're right that Google haven't been patent aggressors up until now but if recent behaviour teaches us anything it's that Google have been very willing to change what they've stood for historically. If you believe that they'd never change that position if they felt it suited them then you have more faith in them than I do."
That just sounds like weak speculation to me. Patent fee extortion is the sort of thing you do if you have a gradually declining (Apple) or minimal (MS) market share.
That is only until you study how you use defensive patents defensively.
Suppose that you join a patent pool like http://www.rpxcorp.com/. Then you're sued by a patent troll with no assets other than a patent. How exactly is RPX going to help you?
They used to state it in their FAQ. Then removed it, but I'm sure they still do it. They negotiate with the troll. And to make it cheap, they give the troll what they want. They give the troll another patent, in return for a binding contract to not sue anyone protected by RPX.
(I became aware of this possibility after 3 patents taken out with my name on it when I was younger got sold to RPX.)
The direct consequence of this would be a call to get rid of the evil on both sides and abolish the (software) patent system altogether.
I'd like to emphasize a quote from the end of the article:
> Patents have become the arena in which tech companies have chosen to do battle.
There is no longer competition about the best user experience or the best technical solution to an engineering problem but competition about who can file the best vague, yet court approved patent and secure the most destructive intellectual properties. I don't understand why we are still only talking about reforming the patent system.
Seriously?
iOS7 and Android Kit Kat both move user experience forward both in terms of the UI and the functionality offered. The latest iPhones, Android phones and Lumias are clearly better than what went before. I suspect if you asked average engineers at Apple, Google or Microsoft how much of their time and energy is taken up addressing problems caused by patents the number would be pretty small and if you look at how much those companies spend on patents, lawyers and settlements it's dwarfed by what they spend on product development.
To put the giant $4.5bn spent on the patents in question in context (and remember that's was shared between several companies), it's about what Samsung spend on marketing in a year or half of Apple's 5C/5S iPhone sales for the first weekend they were on sale.
Yes patents are impacting the industry but that's not to say that competition about things users care about has stopped, it's just slowing things up a bit.
I think "slowing things up a bit" is a great understatement. Hackers who could build the Next Big Thing have no chance at success if it takes a billion-dollar patent arsenal to avoid getting sued out of existence.
Who wins this fight is a side issue. The real issue, I think, is that only such giants can compete. If so, we're missing out on a lot of innovation.
A lot of products can be dreamt of that do not benefit the Apple or Microsoft or Google ecosystems. But can they be built without infringing "a navigation tool for graphical user interface?"
Frankly most of the patents that have been enforced seem to me at least to have been pretty minor and relatively easy to workaround with little real impact on the user.
I could see a short protection period for things like this, but the magnitude of current protections seems extreme.
But that's a somewhat different argument - the original point was that consumers were being significantly impacted and I don't think this shows that.
To my mind the biggest impact may be coming from FRAND patents, the terms of which don't have to be particularly fair or reasonable and as such can easily be used to block new entrants. To my mind FRAND patents should have transparent licensing terms which are common to every licensee whether you be a major multinational or a two man start up.
Something I'd like to see in addition to the now-pending reform is a law limiting damages to a fraction of revenue related to how the patent figures in the device in question. That ends up looking like a mandatory licensing fee, which I think would be about right for those few tech patents which are actually valid.
The fact that one of them is slightly better than the other in one regard doesn't change the fact that neither of them are really that worthy of your support.
You're right that Google haven't been patent aggressors up until now but if recent behaviour teaches us anything it's that Google have been very willing to change what they've stood for historically. If you believe that they'd never change that position if they felt it suited them then you have more faith in them than I do.