Last summer, the news organizations published stories that described the billions in wealth held by the family of the Chinese premier. In response, China shut down the Times’ Mandarin news service, blocked its English website and denied visas to journalists. The government also blocked Bloomberg‘s consumer-facing websites, bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek – a block that remains in place today.

Speaking at the Google Big Tent event in Washington on Friday, Bloomberg’s Chief Content Officer, Norman Pearlstine, explained the decision to publish.”We would lose our credibility [if we didn't],” said Pearlstine. He added that, in China, “information is perceived as belonging to the state” and said he doesn’t anticipate this view changing in the near future.

Bill Keller, a former editor-in-chief and current columnist for the New York Times, echoed Pearlstine’s views that news publishers can’t rationalize censorship by saying they would lose money and influence in China. ”They can make life miserable for you,” Keller said of the Chinese government, adding that “this will cost money.”

There may, however, be a bright side to being shut out of China. According to Keller, many Chinese are aware that the Times and Bloomberg deliberately took a financial hit to preserve their brands — and in the long run, this will earn them loyalty and trust.

Keller and Pearlstine spoke on a panel with media executive Mark Whitaker and Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, at a Google “Big Tent” event about security and free speech in the digital age.

In a statement released this morning, Google and the Association of American Publishers said they have formally resolved a copyright lawsuit that began in 2005. The deal will allow publishers to use books scanned by Google as they see fit — making them available for sale or withholding them.

Google’s top lawyer, David Drummond, said in the statement that the settlement means more ebooks will become available through Google’s online bookstore, Books on Google Play.

Details of the settlement are confidential, but a Google executive revealed in a phone interview with paidContent that the company “has very robust plans to increase analytics” with publishers. This is significant because publishers have long been frustrated by Amazon’s unwillingness to share data like customer profiles and buying habits.

The deal amounts to formal recognition of a process that was occurring already, in which Google and individual publishers were reaching deals. The Google partnership is helpful to the publishers because, in many cases, it will give them access to digital versions of their backlist.

The deal between Google and the publishers is likely, however, to anger the publishers’ one-time partner, the Authors Guild. Unlike the publishers, the Guild decided last December to review its original 2005 class action claim after Judge Denny Chin blew up a controversial three-way settlement deal in the spring of 2011.

Today’s development is also likely to further complicate disputes between authors and publishers over who owns the digital rights to books published in the pre-digital era.

The Google-publisher deal does not  resolve the question of whether Google’s book scanning amounted to copyright infringement. The company is adamant that the scanning qualifies under the “fair use” exemption, while the Authors Guild is demanding it pay $750 per book. Scholars and activists like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed briefs to support Google’s fair use argument. The case is now on hold as an appeals court decides whether it should have gone forward in the first place.

Patents: Motorola may be only number-eight in Gartner’s mobile handset rankings, but it remains one of the earliest movers in the space and a veritable titan when it comes to patents. Google will be buying 15,000 17,000 patents as part of the deal; and Motorola has another 7,500 pending.

Patents were mentioned within the opening minutes of the call, and were the subject of the very first questions from analysts. Not too much deal from Google on the application of the patents themselves. The basic message was that the patents will help “protect” Android.

Cases in point: Oracle is directly fighting Google on Android patents (David Drummond, chief legal counsel: “We believe that [Oracle has made] an ill-founded claim against Google.”). There are also a number of legal battles (and some expensive licensing deals to settle them) that involve handset makers that use the Android platform. And on a less titanic scale, there are potential lawsuits hitting developers who work with Android (such as the case being brought by Lodsys). The acquisition potentially gives Google some artillery in all those fights.

Android, Android partners: Patents may be why Page also noted that the top five Android licensees showed “enthusiastic support” for the deal. Google was quick to put out a release with quotes from four of them to support that. From Samsung’s Mobile head J.K. Shin: “We welcome today’s news, which demonstrates Google’s deep commitment to defending Android, its partners & ecosystem.”

Ultimately, it will depend on how the acquisition and future activities get played out: currently there are 115 million Android devices in the market, being made by some 39 different manufacturers. One of the big draws for Android handset makers up to now has been the royalty-free licenses and the ability to tweak the open-source code (or not, as the case may be).

Motorola integration, regulation: Page’s main message here was business as usual. “We expect no change in how we’re running Android,” he told listeners. Patrick Pichette, Google’s CFO, noted: “We will run Motorola as a separate business and provide separate reporting.”

And that separation, too, might be something Google was keen to emphasize in the frame of regulatory approval of the deal. Unsurprisingly, for now, the companies are “confident” the deal will get approved by regulators in the U.S., Europe and possible other jurisdictions, with Drummond calling the deal a “procompetitive transaction.” But ultimately that will be something for the regulators, rather than Google and Motorola, to decide.

Meanwhile, the markets and the Internet are now zooming with speculation about what this might all mean for the wider mobile competitive landscape. Nokia’s shares are creeping up, as people wonder if this increases the changes of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) buying it; others are questioning whether Google is right to get into devices at this stage. It’s a story that is bound to run for a long time, and likely change the course of the mobile world with it.

That’s why Google’s attempt this week to warn the public of a vast right-wing conspiracy bent on its destruction didn’t really earn it any points, and Microsoft’s release of a private e-mail designed to make Google (NSDQ: GOOG) look hypocritical was childish in its inability to recognize Google’s broader points. Google is right about two things: the patent system is ludicrous and it has no choice but to participate. But you have to wonder what Google hoped to gain by launching a public assault on Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) for playing the same game Google is obviously desperate to play.

Regardless of your corporate loyalties, let’s not be confused about one thing: the U.S. patent system is a mess. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is so backlogged that somebody thought it would be a good idea to build a Web-based dashboard illustrating the gravity of the situation.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 6,775 people worked as patent examiners as of June 2011. There is a backlog of 695,086 patent applications waiting to be processed (actually the lowest number in two years), and applications are growing each month, with 372,980 added in June alone.

If patent applications stopped tomorrow, each patent examiner would have to process about 103 applications to erase the backlog, and in 2009 the average examiner disposed of (approved or denied) 73 patents. The PTO estimates that it would take 22 months just to issue first office actions (i.e., getting around to reading the patent, researching prior art, pondering the claims, and then asking the applicant for further details) for all the applications in that backlog, and the average application requires 2.9 separate office actions. In other words, those people are under an enormous amount of pressure simply to keep their heads above water, let alone consider an extremely complex technical concept with as much knowledge as the company that applied for the patent.

–Software and patents: Given the complexity of the tech industry and the fact that software is more art than machine, it’s simply too easy for patents to be issued that are exceedingly vague, obvious, or simply “bogus,” as Google’s David Drummond put it in his blog post. In an ideal world, patents reward inventors for breakthroughs. In the real world, they reward those who encourage engineers to patent anything they can think of and keep a legal department fully staffed to crank out as many applications as possible.

And so with patents easy to obtain but yet still subject to the same legal protections and privileges, tech companies wind up playing out the principles of “mutually-assured destruction,” the Cold War concept reinvented for the modern mobile computing industry. That’s why Google needs patents, even bogus ones, and is scrambling to find some after Microsoft, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), and others bought a huge chunk of mobile patents from Nortel for $4.5 billion. Even if the concept of patenting software is abhorrent to many in the tech industry (a position that Oracle, currently suing Google for patent infringement of the Android software, once held) their existence is the best way to ensure that you can negotiate a reasonable settlement when sued by a competitor.

I had an off-the-record conversation with a senior legal executive at a major smartphone company earlier this year mostly for the purposes of providing some basic context around how patent negotiations play out. It was revealing: there’s no practical way for someone who builds a new product to obtain a patent license until they are approached by the patent holder for licensing discussions or sued, and there’s certainly no incentive.

Because patents are deliberately written to cover as broad a range of concepts as possible, there’s no definitive way for a person or company that has invented a product to know whether or not they are stepping into patented territory. There are some obvious infringers just trying to make a quick buck, to be sure, but some tech patents are so vague that they appear to cover anything with an on/off switch. Inventors and entrepreneurs are not people who are going to put their idea on a shelf if they come across a ridiculously broad patent, and if they’re unsuccessful, it would have been silly to pay a licensing fee up front. But patent holders have a way of finding companies they perceive to be infringing as soon as the business gets big enough to take a chunk.

The question of whether a product really infringes on a patent doesn’t get addressed until the parties reach the pretrial phase in what’s known as a Markman hearing, during which the judge presiding over the case decides how the key parts of the patent language will be interpreted. That decision can make or break the lawsuit, and it costs a lot of money to get to that point.

With patents, even ones that it doesn’t necessarily believe are legitimate, Google could promise to make life more difficult for those suing it by filing its own patent lawsuit, which would have to be considered on its own merits and would raise the possibility that these disputes end in settlement talks and royalty negotiations rather than court rooms and injunctions. So without patents to hurl back at accusers, Google is extremely vulnerable to getting sucked into expensive patent trials that may never amount to anything, or, in the worst case scenario, could ruin the company even if the patent at issue is a joke.

–Patent Madness: This is stupid. It’s a colossal waste of time and money, bolstered by patents that may or may not have actually been read and a trial system that assumes each patent is valid until the patent office decides otherwise. It’s a game of chicken (or a protection racket, if you prefer) in which companies accused of patent infringement have limited defenses.

But Google is going to play the game, because if it wants to continue life as one of the biggest companies in the tech industry it doesn’t really have a choice. Unlike in WarGames, the only way to lose this game is not to play.

Google’s continuing problem, however, the one that exposes it to such criticism, is that it continues to believe that it is somehow different from its competitors, who it suggests are not playing fair and are just jealous of its success.

“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one,” wrote Larry Page, Google’s current and founding CEO, in the 2004 letter that accompanied its initial public offering. Well, in 2011, conventional mobile companies are making sure they have a strong intellectual property portfolio to defend themselves against attacks from competitors searching for weak points. That is exactly what Google is doing.

Patents are now competitive weapons in the same way supply-chain agreements, employee poaching, and advanced data centers provide companies with competitive advantages. And Apple and Microsoft aren’t doing anything illegal or even necessarily immoral: if they believe Android was developed largely on the backs of their patented technologies, they have the right to do something about it armed with patents that were awarded according to the law.

Whether or not those patents should have ever been awarded is a separate question. But each time Google complains about the rules of the game, it underscores just how weak and vulnerable it is in a legally sanctioned game without serious patent reform (not this thing), which simply isn’t going to happen any time soon in the current political arena, arguably even more dysfunctional than the patent system.

And it also makes the other players at the table take notice. The only thing Drummond may have succeeded in doing is driving up the price of entry into the game.