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Another Android Device Maker Signs Patent Agreement With Microsoft

Posted by Soulskill on from the better-safe-than-sued dept.

doperative writes with this quote from El Reg: "Microsoft has nailed a second Android device maker to a patent licensing agreement. The Redmond software giant announced on Monday that General Dynamics Itronix has signed a patent agreement that will provide 'broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio.' In other words, General Dynamics Itronix has agreed to licensing certain, unnamed Microsoft patents for use with Android-powered portables."

7 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. See. Modern age Feudalism. by unity100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What difference does this have from a robber baron waiting atop a bridge and asking tolls from passers ? no difference.

    baron may have a right to that bridge someone else has built, or, it may not even have the right to it, but it may be claiming it. the deal is, as long as you have less standing and resources than baron in the socio-economic ladder, you cant do anything about it, but pay. Only another baron equal or greater than his socioeconomic status can challenge him.

    ultimate end of capitalism, is feudalism. even if you have brief political freedom until it happens, it eventually happens - just like how it happened from roman republic to roman empire. mechanics are the same, end result is the same, just the names are different.

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    Read radical news here
    1. Re:See. Modern age Feudalism. by LordLucless · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ultimate end of capitalism, is feudalism. even if you have brief political freedom until it happens, it eventually happens

      You do realise that patents and corporations have nothing to do with capitalism, yes? Given that they are government-granted protections, you could argue that they're antithetical to capitalism.

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      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
  2. 500,000 New Android Devices A Day by AddisonW · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The fact that the entire mobile developer world is now doing Android IS the reason Microsoft has been reduced to this humiliating desperation.

    1. Re:500,000 New Android Devices A Day by tripleevenfall · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's humiliating in the sense that their floundering mobile platform isn't being seriously considered - by consumers for one, but by handset makers either.

      It's desperation because Microsoft totally reinvented themselves in the mobile space, replaced one crappy platform with another, and still is flatlined in this marketplace, unable to make money, watching the PC platform slip away - so they have to resort to running a protection racket.

      In my opinion that is in fact both humiliating and desperate - but I can't get a refund on my MBA as I'm not finished paying for it yet...

    2. Re:500,000 New Android Devices A Day by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's brilliant. They make money simply by threatening people with litigation. Pure, unadulterated genius. It doesn't matter if their shitty windows 7 phones flop, they make money if android succeeds! Man, that is innovation.

  3. I'm glad Motorola, at least, is fighting by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At some point these "unnamed patents" that are allegedly being infringed need to see the light of day.

    On the face of it, this situation is too similar to the SCO lawsuits for comfort - talk of unnamed, unspecified patents against which Android is infringing, and a lot of lawyers to inflict the death of 1000 cuts if the company dares trying to fight. I suspect the similarity in tactics is not a coincidence.

    Interesting that, AFAIK, they aren't going after Google - but then Microsoft knows Google has lots of lawyers as well.

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    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:I'm glad Motorola, at least, is fighting by Raenex · · Score: 5, Informative

      At some point these "unnamed patents" that are allegedly being infringed need to see the light of day.

      It took a surprising amount of searching to find it, as most of the stories did not list the patents, but I found a couple of sites ([1], [2]) that have them. Here's the list from [2]:

      • U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517 ("the '517 patent") entitled: "Common name space for long and short filenames." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to data processing systems and, more particularly, to a common name space for long and short filenames.
      • U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352 ("the '352 patent") entitled: "Common name space for long and short filenames."
      • U.S. Patent No. 6,621,746 ("the '746 patent") entitled: "Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to flash memory devices, and more particularly, monitoring when to perform an erase operation in a flash memory device."
      • U.S. Patent No. 6,826,762 ("the '762 patent") entitled: "Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to application programming interfaces (APIs) and, even more particularly, relates to a Radio Interface Layer comprising a set of APIs." Only this patent within the group relates to the product known as the "Motorola Charm."
      • U.S. Patent No. 6,909,910 ("the '910 patent") entitled: "Method and system for managing changes to a contact database." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to mobile computing, and more particularly to updating a contact database within a mobile computing device."
      • U.S. Patent No. 7,644,376 ("the '376 patent") entitled: "Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes." Microsoft states in their patent that "Briefly described, the present invention is directed at unifying state and notification architecture across devices."
      • U.S. Patent No. 5,664,133 ("the '133 patent") entitled: "Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to the field of user interfaces for computer systems, and more particularly to graphical user interfaces wherein a user selects from a collection of graphical representations displayed upon a video screen corresponding to actual computer resources."
      • U.S. Patent No. 6,578,054 ("the '054 patent") entitled: "Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates to "to the support of on-line and off-line transmission and synchronization of data. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods that eliminate redundant data transmission and allow multiple copies of data to be synchronized so that incremental changes made to one copy of the data can be identified, transferred, and incorporated into the other copy of the data, regardless of whether the incremental changes are made on-line or off-line."
      • U.S. Patent No. 6,370,566 ("the '566 patent") entitled: "Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device." Microsoft's patent abstract describes the patent this way: The present invention includes a mobile device which provides the user with the ability to schedule a meeting request from the mobile device itself. The mobile device creates an object representative of the meeting request and assigns the object a global identification number which uniquely identifies the object to other devices which encounter the object. In addition, the mobile devic