Re:Google Granted Design Patent for Its Homepage
by Perceval on Wednesday September 02, 2009 @05:22PM
(#801144)
Until there is patent reform, all companies will engage in this kind of cover-your-ass patenting. There are too many patent trolls out there starting multi-million dollar lawsuits on the basis of seemingly frivolous, obvious, or otherwise vague patents. As a defensive measure, companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on attempt to patent everything they can possibly think of in order to prevent lawsuits from patent trolls or rivals.
As they say, "don't hate the playa, hate the game." It was obvious in the late 1990s that intellectual property laws needed reform, and it's increasingly obvious by the day when we see companies being forced to patent things that appear obvious or trivial.
I don't think for a minute that Google is going to turn around and start suing every other website with a minimalistic search interface as their landing page. I think this is a purely defensive measure.
Re:Google Granted Design Patent for Its Homepage
by aardvarkious on Wednesday September 02, 2009 @05:23PM
(#801146)
I don't know if it is necessarily bad for them to do this. If they don't what is to stop someone else from filing a similar patent and suing them. It seems like this is the best way for them to protect themselves.
If, on the other hand, they start using this patent to sue others: that would be very bad indeed.
If they would just come out and say we're just like all the other cutthroats out there it would be one thing, but to have all these lofty ideals and then to do stuff like this at the same time creates a real problem.
People will start to think that this kind of patent is ok. It's not. It's a web based user interface, a hole in a page with a couple of buttons next to it. There have been many sites before google that started out with an interface like that. The only thing special about the google page is that they kept it like that.