According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Google has turned to IBM once more for patents.  The documents recently released on the organization’s website confirm that IBM handed over 1,023 patents to Google as of August 17.  Financial terms of the deal were not revealed. It has previously acquired a batch of a thousand patents from IBM for a wide array of markets 2 months ago.

However, search space blog “SEO by the Sea” speculates that the patents might be off by a figure and is actually only 1,022 since a number appears to be wrong.  Still, Google has acquired stacks of patents that spans across different markets, but can help the company defend itself against patent infringement lawsuits.  USPTO said Google has patents in communications on a network, audio communications, signature verification on document, and animation reuse in three dimensional virtual reality, among others.

According to a statement from CNET, the company didn’t reveal its spending on patents but said that they will “acquire patents that are relevant to (our) business needs.” The patent shopping spree follows its defeat by the joint forces of Apple, Microsoft and Research in Motion in acquiring the 6,000 patents and patent applications owned by Nortel Networks that costs $4.3 billion. The search giant also acquired Motorola Mobility–with 17,000 approved patents and 7,500 pending for ratification– for $12.5 billion in order to boost its catalogue of patents.  It was later discovered that Google overspent about 33% for the Motorola deal just to avoid a fate similar to the Nortel patents debacle.

“We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android,” said Google CEO Larry Page in a blog post announcing the Motorola Mobility acquisition. “The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to ‘protect competition and innovation in the open source software community’ and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

Google turns to patent acquisitions as a method of bulking up its own portfolio in an effort to avoid getting continuously sued by Microsoft, Apple and Oracle.  It’s also an effort to defend Android from these rivals, on top of gearing itself up for the loss in Nortel Patent war months ago that led Google to file an anti-trust lawsuit. Google claims that the patents acquired are only meant to defend themselves.  To prove so, they handed over 9 patents to HTC to fight an Apple lawsuit.