原作者：
来源Microsoft’s Android Shakedown - Timothy Lee - Disruptive Economics - Forbes
译者kneep
In the 1980s, attorney Gary Reback was working at Sun Microsystems, then a young technology startup. A pack of IBM employees in blue suits showed up at Sun headquarters seeking royalties for 7 patents that IBM claimed Sun had infringed. The Sun employees, having examined the patents, patiently explained that six of the seven patents were likely invalid, and Sun clearly hadn’t infringed the seventh. Reback explains what happened next in this classic Forbes article:
在1980年代，律师加里·里巴克在Sun工作，那时候Sun还是个新生的创业公司。一群身着蓝色西装的IBM雇员忽然出现在Sun总部，来索要七项专利的授权费，IBM声称Sun侵犯了他们这七项专利。Sun工作人员查看了这几项专利，苦口婆心地解释说，其中六项是无效专利，另外一项他们也没有侵犯。里巴克在下面这篇经典的文章中描绘了接下来的情景：
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. “OK,” he said, “maybe you don’t infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?” After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.
“令人难堪的安静接踵而来，就算蓝西装们互相之间也不说话。他们就纹丝不动地坐在那里。最后，带头大哥发话了。‘好吧’，他说，‘可能你们真的没有侵犯这七项专利。但我们拥有10000项美国专利，总有一款适合你们。你们是想让我们回Armonk（IBM在纽约的总部）再找七项专利过来呢？还是直接花两千万美元消灾？’随便讨价还价了几下，Sun就扯了一张支票给IBM，而蓝西装们则向下一个猎物进发了。”
This story sheds light on the recent string of stories about Microsoft demanding royalty payments from various companies that produce smart phones built on Google‘s Android operating system. Intuitively, this doesn’t make much sense. Most people would say that Google has been more innovative than Microsoft in recent years—especially in the mobile phone market—so why is Microsoft the one collecting royalties?
看了这个故事，也就不难明白微软最近的行径了，他们到处向那些生产Android手机的厂商索要授权费。乍一看，这好像没道理啊。大家都认为最近几年Google比微软更具创新力——尤其在智能手机市场——怎么反倒轮到微软来收授权费了？
The reason is that Microsoft has more patents than Google. A lot more. The patent office has awarded Google about 700 patents in its 13-year lifetime. Microsoft has received 700 patents in the last four months. Microsoft’s total portfolio is around 18,000 patents, and most of those were granted within the last decade.
原因就是微软比Google拥有更多的专利。多很多。Google创业13年以来，总共只获得了700项专利。微软上四个月就收获了700项。微软总的专利数大概是18000项，大多数都是过去十年中获得的。
Even if you think Microsoft is more innovative than Google, the engineers in Redmond obviously haven’t been 25 times as innovative as those in Mountain View. So why the huge discrepancy?
就算微软比Google更具创新力，也不至于25倍这么厉害。差距为何如此之大？
Getting software patents takes a lot of work, but it’s not primarily engineering effort. The complexity of software and low standards for patent eligibility mean that software engineers produce potentially patentable ideas all the time. But most engineers don’t think of these relatively trivial ideas as “inventions” worthy of a patent. What’s needed to get tens of thousands of patents is a re-education campaign to train engineers to write down every trivial idea that pops into their heads, and a large and disciplined legal bureaucracy to turn all those ideas into patent applications.
获取软件专利是大费周折的一件事，但主要的工作量不在技术上。软件是很复杂的东西，它的专利门槛很低，这就意味着软件工程师随手想个主意都有可能变成专利。但大多数工程师都觉得这些雕虫小技根本算不上“发明”，不值得申请专利。所以获得成千上万件专利是一项浩大的再教育工程，你要教会工程师们随时记下他们头脑中的灵感，还需要一个庞大、训练有素的官僚体系，把构思变成专利。
Creating such a bureaucracy has a high opportunity cost for small, rapidly growing companies. Most obviously, it requires spending scarce capital on patent lawyers. But it also means pulling engineers away from doing useful work to help lawyers translate their “inventions” into legal jargon. And that, in turn requires a shift in corporate culture. Startups are innovative precisely because they avoid getting bogged down in paperwork. Convincing engineers to pay more attention to patent applications necessarily means that they spend less time doing useful work, and that can be fatal to a young startup.
对于快速成长的小公司来说，建立这样一个官僚体系的机会成本很高。最明显的是，它需要付出大把资金来聘请专利律师。同时也意味着工程师干不了正事，成天帮律师把他们的发明翻译成法律术语。久而久之，会给公司文化带来负面影响。初创的公司之所以具有创新力，是因为他们不会整天被文案工作所淹没。说服工程师花更多的时间考虑专利申请，就意味着他们干正事的时间少了，这对创业公司来说是致命的。
The opportunity costs to getting patents is much lower for mature software companies like Microsoft or IBM. They tend to have more money and engineers than they know what to do with. And their software development processes are already slow and bureaucratic. So it’s much easier to add a “fill out patent applications” step to the official software development process, and the negative effect on engineers’ productivity is much smaller.
对于微软和IBM这样成熟的软件公司来说，这个机会成本就小得多。他们有用不完的钱和人。他们的软件开发流程本来已经又臭又长，在这个流程里面再加一条——“填张专利申请表”，简直就是小事一桩，这个对生产率的负面影响微不足道。
These differences are exacerbated by the long time lag between when applications are filed and patents are granted. Most of the 52 patents Microsoft received this week were filed between 2006 and 2008. One was filed as early as 2003. In 2006, Microsoft had been steadily cranking out patent applications for years, while Google was only just becoming large and profitable enough justify devoting serious resources to patent filings. So even if Google cranks up its patenting machine to Microsoft’s level this year, it won’t start seeing the fruits of that effort until around 2015.
由于专利从申请到批准，需要很长一段时间，所以目前这两家的专利数差距还会进一步拉大。微软本周获得的52项专利中，大多数都是在2006到2008之间提交的，有一件甚是早在2003年就提交了。2006年的时候，微软已经每年有稳定的专利产出，而Google当时才刚刚有人力和财力去支撑专利申请工作。就算今年Google的专利生产机器能赶上微软的规模，它也要等到2015年才开始收获成果。
You might think Google could deal with this by just not infringing Microsoft’s patents, but that’s not how software patents work. Android has roughly 10 million lines of code. Auditing 10 million lines of code for compliance with 18,000 patents is an impossible task—especially because the meaning of a patent’s claims are often not clear until after they have been litigated. Most Silicon Valley companies don’t even try to avoid infringing patents. They just ignore them and hope they’ll be able to afford good lawyers when the inevitable lawsuits arrive.
你可能觉得Google不去侵犯微软的专利就行了吧，但软件专利不是这么玩的。Android大概有一千万行代码，要审计这一千万行代码有没有侵犯18000项专利是不可能的事——尤其是，专利的描述都是模棱两可的，这样，一旦打官司，什么都可以往上套。大多数硅谷公司根本不指望能避开别人的专利地雷，他们基本上就听天由命，出事了就指望请得起好律师来搞定官司。
So Android, like every large software product on the planet, infringes numerous Microsoft patents. And Microsoft is taking full advantage. They’re visiting Android licensees and giving the same sales pitch Reback remembers from a quarter century ago. “Do you really want us to go back to Redmond and find patents you infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us?” Once again, many of the targets are writing checks to make the problem go away.
所以，Android，就像世界上每一个大型软件产品一样，侵犯了微软大量的专利。微软完全占据了主动。他们逐个拜访了生产Android手机的厂商，端着一副销售员的腔调，就像里巴克回忆起二十五年前的情景一样，“你们是想让我们回Redmond（译者注：微软总部所在地）再给你找几项专利来呢？还是直接花钱消灾？”，再一次，很多受害者写下了支票，然后请他们走人。
The result is a transfer of wealth from young, growing, innovative companies like Google to mature, bureaucratic companies like Microsoft and IBM—precisely the opposite of the effect the patent system is supposed to have.
最终的结果是，财富从像Google这样富有创新力的成长型公司，转移到像微软、IBM这样成熟且官僚的公司——专利制度的初衷本来是为了保护创新公司的利益，但结果却背道而驰。
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