In Few weeks ago, it was the Googles executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, who made headlines by claiming, lawsuits on Android OS users were inspired by jealousy. Now we have Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, giving his a rather elaborate twist to that issue of lawsuits. On Googles official blog, there is a new post by Drummond, titled When patents attack Android.
Here is an excerpt from the post:
Android is on fire. More than 550,000 Android devices are activated every day, through a network of 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers. Android and other platforms are competing hard against each other, and thats yielding cool new devices and amazing mobile apps for consumers.But Androids success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.Theyre doing this by banding together to acquire Novells old patents (the CPTN group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortels old patents (the Rockstar group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didnt get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Phone 7; and even suing Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a tax for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation.
On their part, Apple and Microsoft can always claim that they paid more for the Nortel and Novell patents because they thought that the patents were worth more than Google did. So the whine that Drummond seems to have posted in his blog seems like a typical case of sour grapes. Quite interestingly, Drummond writes in his post, "Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other's throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what's going on.
As of now Google continues to forge ahead in the smartphone market, but it could grow much faster if the company were not hampered by a lack of intellectual property in wireless telephony, which has exposed it to patent-infringement lawsuits from rivals like Oracle, Apple, Microsoft and others. It lost out on the Nortel patents to a consortium grouping Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion and others, which together paid $4.5 billion. The Android software, now used by major phone and tablet makers including HTC, Motorola and Samsung, has rapidly overtaken Nokia to become the world's most popular smartphone platform, with about a third of the market.
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