Google made its most recent move in the ongoing great game of acquiring tech patents. The company purchased a bundle of more than 1,000 patents from IBM, according to a report in The New York Times.
Reiterating a long-espoused strategy of the tech giant, an e-mail statement from Google said that the purchase was relevant to its "business needs," stressing, "Bad software patent litigation is a wasteful war that no one will win." In short, the idea is that preemptively buying patents will mean lawsuits are less likely down the line.
"Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories," Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote in April.
The purchase is a coup for Google, which lost out on a large block of Nortel patents last month that was eventually picked up by a consortium of its competitors for a staggering $4.5 billion cash bid.
