ABOUT 7 years ago I wrote to Google managers whom I knew that they should refrain from hiring patent lawyers, collecting lots of patents, and basically turning the company into a big patent bubble. But this had little effect on the company's decision; it has since then been taken over by 'foreign' (newly-hired) influence.
"We can no longer say what we used to say -- that Google was officially using patents only for defensive purposes or in response to a preemptive attack from other companies."Google, over time, went from being a patent sceptic to gradually becoming a patent collector. Now, as we feared, Google becomes patent aggressor. Google is gradually becoming a patent bully now, even if it calls itself "Alphabet", and it's bad even if the defendant is a company that's pure evil (as in this case). Even IAM took note of it already; it recalled the BT case which we covered here many times before as follows: "The first and really only high-profile patent infringement lawsuit Google has pursued was against BT - and even that was after BT had transferred patents to a third party which had then used them to sue the search giant. Google quickly filed a counter suit against the British telco and the conflict ultimately fizzled out. So, for a Google business to be asserting now is a very big deal indeed."
There is already a huge trove of news articles about it, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4]. It's everywhere. The effect on the competitor was described yesterday as follows:
When Anthony Levandowski loped onto the stage to accept the Hot New Startup award at an industry awards show this month, the trucker hat perched on his head served as a cringeworthy nod to the millions of drivers his self-driving truck company is poised to leave jobless.
Three weeks later, it is the pioneering engineer of self-driving car technology whose job could be in jeopardy, and the lawsuit he is named in could pose an existential threat to an increasingly vulnerable Uber.