The purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion brings a lot of technology to Google, and possibly even the platform for a Google-branded Android phone. The biggest value of the deal, however, may be in adding 17,000 patents to Google's intellectual property portfolio, which currently only has around a thousand. And of those new patents, eighteen of them will be a particular thorn in the side for Apple.
These eighteen patents date back to 1994 and form the basis for three current Motorola lawsuits against Apple. The patents protect technology critical to the mobile device market, including location services, antenna designs, email transmission, touchscreen motions, app management, and third generation wireless.
Google, who believes their Android OS is "under threat" from both Apple and Microsoft, has never brought a patent infringement case against another company. Google has also been able to avoid most of the litigation battles going on now because Android is available for free to hardware manufacturers like HTC and Samsung. However, this Motorola Mobility purchase not only gives Google an entry point should they wish to manufacturer their own hardware, it also potentially shifts the balance of power toward Google in future patent litigation.
Ron Epstein, CEO of the patent brokerage firm Epicenter IP Group LLC, sums it up like this: “They brought a set of patents that they thought would do a job they set out for, which is telling Apple to back off.”
Via Bloomberg
Adrian covers daily news as well as the weekly Law & Apple column for MacLife.com. You can follow him on Twitter, if you want to.
LDMartin1959
August 22, 2011 at 4:08pm
No problem for Apple. Remember, Google said that using patents to shut down competitors was a bad thing. So, of course, they, claiming to be full of integrity and claiming to live by the motto "Do no evil", won't sue anyone.
Of course, that's only a slogan thought up to mask their evil intentions and signifying nothing in the real world. So, if it's evil when it's Microsoft and Apple doing it against Google, what about when the shoe is on the other foot? Surely they wouldn't prove themselves to be hypocrites and crybabies by doing the reverse to Apple and Microsoft, would they?
For those Googlites amongst us, let me explain the meaning of a few important words from the previous paragraph: A hypocrite is someone who does something after criticizing someone else for doing the same thing. A crybaby is someone who, after proving themselves a hypocrite, tries to justify their hypocrisy by whining about how "they did it first". That's not what you really want to show yourselves to be, is it?
Or is it?
