14 DAY TRIAL // Reluctantly perhaps, Facebook is starting to gear up for patent war. The company is said to have acquired some 750 patents from IBM, which has been doing quite a business selling hoards of patents to companies in need, Google in particular.
There's no official word on the deal or on the price. Judging by past transactions, Facebook paid several hundreds of millions of dollars for the patents, which it probably plans to use defensively, at least for now.
Facebook's been doing well so far avoiding major clashes, it's no stranger to lawsuits, but it hasn't gotten much attention from patent trolls, at least not ones that pose a serious threat.
But with Yahoo's lawsuit over patent issues of last week, things are changing. And, after Facebook goes public, you can expect more companies trying to cash in via patent lawsuits.
Facebook "needs" more patents, at least that's the conventional and sometimes interested view.
In a world where everyone is suing everyone else over patents, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are going after Google for example, patents act like nuclear weapons, you need to stockpile them to put off companies that have a bigger arsenal than you.
Facebook only had 33 patents and 149 applications at the end of last year, bringing a slingshot to a gunfight, compared to the thousands or tens of thousands that older companies have, the ones that enjoy bullying the competition.
So Facebook did the only logical thing, it wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on patents it doesn't need or plan to use in any meaningful way, money that could have been used to build a data center, hire more people or anything else that would actually help the company and users.
But as long as the patent system remains as broken as it is and as long as lawyers will have more power than the people actually building things in a company, this is going to continue to happen.