Why No War Over MS's Android Patent Shakedown?

jfruhlinger writes "When challenged directly by Oracle over Android intellectual property, Google has proven itself a feisty opponent. So why is it sitting back and letting Microsoft shake down OEMs over its claims to own patents that Android infringes? A disheartened Tom Henderson thinks it's because Microsoft has been smart to go after the vendors rather than poke at Google directly. Still, he wonders when Google will get into the fight." Glyn Moody thinks Google should join the fight as well.

Comments

Perhaps the patents are legit, valid patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is no one mentioning the possibility that M$'s patents might be legit, novel patents that don't cover something frivolous? That would be a damn fine reason to license the patents.

Re:Perhaps the patents are legit, valid patents?

[Insanity Defense]

Why is no one mentioning the possibility that M$'s patents might be legit, novel patents that don't cover something frivolous?

Probably due to the words of a Microsoft executive. When Ballmer first started the whole "Linux violates our patents and some one has to pay" campaign people asked which patents precisely. The executive indicated that he wouldn't say as they might be challenged and invalidated. If Microsft is so sure why not tell so it can be fixed?

It is like the whole SCO fiasco claiming that Linux violated their Unix copyrights (which they have now been ruled twice in courts not to own) but they would never say what code it was out of fear that the "code would be replaced".

Both sets lawsuits seem to me to be based on the idea of never letting the alleged infringement be known and fixed so that they can collect eternal tolls based on their unsupported allegations.

Re:Perhaps the patents are legit, valid patents?

[zill]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, unless, of course, you are bashing Microsoft on Slashdot.

Re:Perhaps the patents are legit, valid patents?

[jc42]

Allegedly 42 for just the kernel just from MS.

But the main comment about such numbers has been "[citation needed]". MS's patent-violation claims seems to be trade secrets. We can't recode the purported violations, because we don't know where in the code they are and what specific patent they violate. MS won't tell us.

This is part of the "patent troll" concept, and it's why people are classifying MS's patent "agreements" as shakedowns and a protection racket.

Myself, I'd be happy to rewrite any of my code so as to avoid patent and/or copyright violations. As an experienced coder, I can usually come up with several ways to do any particular task. But to do that in a way that violates patents or copyrights, I have to know what they are, and how they violate someone's patent or copyright. This information has become nearly impossible to get from claimants, other than by spending millions of dollars on legal expenses.

The whole "IP" fuss in the US is essentially due to the change in the laws some time back, so that patents can be written in legalese rather than engineerese, making them incomprehensible to anyone but lawyers. And often not even to lawyers, who often respond to questions with "I don't know what that means; we'll have to ask the courts." Again, millions of dollars and many lost years before we get an answer.

Copyright is even more bizarre, with corporations even making copyright claims on nothing at all, or blank lines. Some time back, when SCO claimed a specific number of copyright violations in the linux code, someone did a bit of grepping, and reported that the number agreed almost exactly with the count of "/*" and "*/" lines in the code. But again, SCO never actually told us which lines were in violation of a copyright, making it impossible to rewrite them so they didn't infringe.

Anyone know a fast, efficient way to find out exactly what lines of code are in violation of some corporation's patents or copyrights? Until we can quickly determine that information, they can continue their protection racket unhindered by legal concerns.

The obvious is being missed:

[gcnaddict]

I'm going to leave two points for consideration:

1) as the first AC mentioned, the patents may be legitimate. In discussions about MS patent litigation, I've noted that Microsoft actually does a good job of leveraging patents over which it has ownership rather than simply letting them sit in a bank, so there's a good chance they're leveraging their options because Microsoft may actually be using these patents in Windows Phone 7.

2) Google needs a foothold in the mobile market. Even if this means OEMs have to pay Microsoft for patents Microsoft owns, I figure Google won't care simply because this means Google still has a foothold as both an advertisement platform and an application platform, which is something Google would be hard-pressed to challenge just for the sake of challenging royalties which manufacturers are willingly paying. After all, these OEMs have their own teams of lawyers, and these lawyers likely see something we don't, suggesting to us on the outside that Microsoft may actually have a valid claim to the patents in question.

MS friendly pop-media would have a field day

[walterbyrd]

If Google were to ever fight back, the Microsoft friendly pop-media would have a field day.

The Microsoft friendly pop-media would scream, and cry, and carry-on, non-stop about how Google is abusing the legal system to preserve google's monopoly.

This sort of thing happens all the time.

Remember the big fuss that made when legal action was taken against Cisco for GPL violations? "The foss folks are a bunch of hypocrites! They complain when scox tries to protect it's IP rights, but they're the first to file a lawsuit against anybody else!"

How about Microsoft accusing Google of being a patent troll when Google tried to buy Nortel?

How about all the privacy accusations against Google, backed by Fackbook's biggest investor?

Of course Microsoft has a huge problem with any sort of monopoly. Not just the Google monopoly, remember Microsoft's recent attacks against IBM's monopoly - the TurboHercules scandal?

My all-time favorite was the massive fear campaign about the horrors of having one company (Netscape) controlling the critical browser market! Rags like "Infoworld" carried on about that for months. At the time, Netscape had a monopolistic 70% of the browser market - oh the horror! After Microsoft defeated Netscape, and MSIE went on to control about 90% of the browser market (at one time); the same ms-friendly rags saw no problem with that.

Microsoft loves to scream, and cry, about Microsoft competitors, who do the same sorts of things that msft does; even though msft is about 100X worse.

Re:Not Sco at all

[NullProg]

In this case, careful review by a number of hardware makers has led them to pay Microsoft to license the patents. We may not know exactly what they are using but you can bet the companies paying Microsoft had to have pretty good proof before they simply handed over per-device fees to another company.

I doubt that. All the companies that have licensed the patents for their Android devices also ship Windows devices. More than likely Microsoft threatened them over Windows pricing if they didn't agree to the patents. See the monopoly trial transcripts on Microsoft's use of predatory pricing tactics.

The one Android using company that didn't license the patents also doesn't ship any Windows versions. According to Barnes and Noble the patents are weak. See

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/04/28/039255/BampN-Responds-To-Microsofts-Android-Suit

Food for thought,
Enjoy.

Considering the source...

[Petersko]

"Given that every patent Microshit's gotten in the past 20 years has been the result of patent-slamming and abuse of the system?"

You've regressed so far that you think misspelling "Microsoft" with the word "shit" in it is either creative, useful, funny, or relevant, so I'll forgive you just being wrong for the rest of your post.

Software patents really are different than others

[Rob Y.]

Software patents are a different kind of animal than other patents, and Microsoft's been on both ends of the evil spectrum in this regard.

Software patents are rarely used for simply collecting appropriate royalties on a software 'invention'. More commonly, they're either used to shake down rich companies (like Microsoft, who have been the victims of such trolls) or they're used in an anti-competitive manner (mainly by Microsoft) to punish companies that have the nerve to build successful products without using Microsoft (or Oracle, or...) software.

The VFAT patent is a case in point. Nobody uses VFAT because they think it's a great filesystem. No modern filesystem uses the patented VFAT 'dual-naming' system, but products have used VFAT because that's the easiest way to make products that need to connect to a computer work with 90+ percent of the computers out there. Royalties on VFAT should be struck down based on the non-innovative technology in question (basically a kludge to fix a broken filesystem). They should also be struck down based on their anti-competitive nature. VFAT royalties are a form of illegal tying to a monopoly product. As are any patents on CIFS, or other communications protocols built in to Windows.

But how about a so-called 'legitimate' software patent? In the case of a piece of patented hardware, somebody who wants to use that hardware in their invention will buy the hardware, which would come with a license to use the patent. In fact, they might have to buy the hardware from the patent-holder. There would be a cost involved, but it wouldn't be much more than the cost of the part without the patent license. Now look at the Android patents. There's a patent on displaying text in a web page prior to downloading the embeddded graphics. Leaving aside whether Microsoft actually 'invented' that, in less time than it took to type that sentence, I know how to implement it, using no Microsoft code. And yet Microsoft is charging $5 per unit for phones incorporating this (and a few other similarly trivial) patented inventions. And for a few dollars more, they'll sell you WinMo7, a full-blown platform of which the patented ideas are a negligible part. How about I buy the patented stuff for an appropriate fraction of the full $15 WinMo, and you can keep the rest? The purpose of charging these royalties is to make a free OS cost essentially as much as the Microsoft offering. But setting prices this way is anti-competitive. The Windows (and Office) monopolies already give MS several competitive steps up in entering new arenas where interaction with those products is important. But they want more. They always want more.