"To make a parallel with an art auction, it would be like half of the bidding floor banding together simply to ensure that another promiment bidder didn't get the piece."
Except that the "another prominent bidder" was invited to join the party but the bidder refused. If groups were forming, they were forming. If Google did not want to join, they did not want to join. But if they want to complain about others forming groups when it's legal - I'm not sure if one should have sympathy for them.
(The argument that I am going to make, has been posted a lot of times before - we need a way to merge threads)
1. You are confusing deals - Novell and Nortel
2. Actually it was (Google + Intel) vs Apple et al.
3. There is no sense - no profit for Google to be a part of bidding group that consists of competitors who are suing Google for IP infringement. Firstly, the deals were not discussed, so we can only guess what MS et al. were offering. So if I were to make a guess, MS et al. would have offered shared usage of Novell patents with (zero or minimal) licensing of IPs with guarantee of no lawsuits. Google would have required these patents, not because it wanted to build products relating to them but because they can be used to defend against other companies when they bring lawsuits on Google. These other companies are MS et al. So being in the same bidding group G to bid for patent set X as the company that wants to (counter-)sue other companies in G using the IPs in X would be illegal because of the contract. Hence, a useless deal for Google.
The scenario described in point number three is possible, it is also possible that MS and Google could have negotiated a cross-licencing deal of sorts to help their Bing and Android businesses. So we just don't know.
But there still are Appl et al. involved in the group. Additionally, I don't believe that such a deal would benefit MS. They are earning more from Android than Windows Mobile!
> But if they want to complain about others forming groups when it's legal
Do you really mean 'when', or 'if'?
The Novell patent group were restricted by the DoJ as to what they could do with those patents. This would indicate to me the original terms were not quite as legal as you make it out to be, and that this kind of thing can easily happen in the future (precedent has been set).
Except that the "another prominent bidder" was invited to join the party but the bidder refused. If groups were forming, they were forming. If Google did not want to join, they did not want to join. But if they want to complain about others forming groups when it's legal - I'm not sure if one should have sympathy for them.