Obama moves on patent reform to help out Google

Obama is trying to change the patent rules so as to help out his friends over at Google. Here is a useful piece from the WSJ:

Google has come from nowhere to build a dominant position in smartphone software based on tying a free Android to Google search advertising (which is fine) and, arguably, by helping itself to seminal Apple innovations that created today's smartphone industry (not so fine).

Google's approach implicitly assumes that nobody has a right to exclude Google from use of their intellectual property. At best, after litigation, they might have a right to be compensated by Google.

But this is not how the patent system is supposed to work. Let us understand that Google's purchase of Motorola is the purchase of a bargaining asset; it does not automatically put Google in the right. Apple, as a patent holder, has every right to seek to preserve exclusive use of its inventions. In its eBay decision, the Supreme Court allowed that the possibility of "irreparable harm" might justify banning an infringing product outright, equivalent to an ITC import exclusion.

Those given to hyperbole might wonder what could be a clearer example of "irreparable harm" than Google stealing an industry. . . .