The Competition of Patents

The tech industry is highly competitive; that is an obvious observation. With more and more competition rising with the creation of new products and ideas, companies are looking for any way to gain an advantage over their competition. One way that mobile phone companies have been trying to gain advantages over their competitors is the use of patent and anti trust laws. The problem with anti-trust laws and patent laws are that they have completely opposite goals. Patent laws are meant to enable investors to hold a monopoly on and idea or product, where anti trust laws are in place to prevent monopolies. This contradiction in laws has began to cause issues in the computer hardware industry because every electronic devise has many patents and companies are trying to create lawsuits to obtain a competitive edge or gain more money as a result of such lawsuits. They are also charging large fees for the use of patented products to further discourage the use of their products by competition. The competitive nature of patents has caused companies to battle over the rights to patents to where the Supreme Court must get involved. When a company called Rockstar Bidco outbid Google for a group of patents Google then went and bought Motorola for 12.5 million dollars for the simple reason of gaining control over more patents. The courts found this transaction a little unnerving in regards to anti trust laws and is currently in an ongoing investigation over it. There are many other examples of patent vs. Antitrust laws involving electronics in recent years. The Obama administration’s Justice Department has become increasingly concerned with these issues. The way the laws are now can potentially cause too many issues which I my opinion may need to change to keep competition from getting out of hand but a change in government policy could also hurt some large computer hardware companies by forcing them to lose a part of their competitive edge.

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