Slog

News & Arts

Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

« The Human Brain and the Beasts of A… | Obama to Ease Student Loan Debt »

Monday, October 24, 2011

Tech Half of Android Makers Now Pay Tribute to Microsoft

Posted by Goldy on Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 8:22 AM

Folks aren't quite lining up yet to purchase Windows Phones, but that doesn't mean Microsoft isn't raking in money off the smartphone industry. Over the weekend, Microsoft signed a patent licensing deal with yet another Android manufacturer—original design manufacturer, Compal—bringing the total number of licensees to ten.

Together with the license agreements signed in the past few months with Wistron and Quanta Computer, today’s agreement with Compal means more than half of the world’s ODM industry for Android and Chrome devices is now under license to Microsoft’s patent portfolio,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Intellectual Property Group at Microsoft.

It's interesting to note that these licenses apparently include both Android and Chrome, making neither of these two free operating systems all that free. And with Apple apparently willing to go "thermonuclear" to protect its patents from Android infringement, the evolving legal landscape could put Microsoft in a very advantageous position as it attempts to sign up more WP7/WP8 licensees. Microsoft indemnifies WP7 licensees for operating system related patent infringements, Google does not; this could ultimately make WP7 cheaper to license than Android, giving Microsoft a competitive advantage in the smartphone wars.

Comments (6) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

And they say "crime doesn't pay".

Posted by Tom on October 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM

This is why Google bought motorola. As soon as that gets finalized and the patents that they now own get sorted out, Google will probably either indemnify it's partners; or they will allow free cross licenses to those patents for their partners. Then everyone is going to stop paying Microsoft because they will have enough patents to sue Microsoft back and we go back to the state of mutually assured destruction as soon as someone files a lawsuit.

All of this is just an example of why the patent system in this country is completely broken and needs to be overhauled.

Posted by arbeck

on October 24, 2011 at 9:41 AM

@2 - I hope so. It's really breathtaking to see Apple and Microsoft taking Google to task for infringing patents when all technology tends to be built on the foundations laid by those who came before. It's not like iOS was a wholly original product (Palm and Blackberry, *ahem*), and it's not like Windows was the first GUI operating system ("stolen" from Apple, which was "stolen" from Xerox). But the overarching problem, as I see it, goes to how fucked it is to try to place clamps on innovation where pushing technology forward in a way which will ostensibly benefit everybody requires building innovations upon the successful parts of past innovations. A tangential problem is present in the biotech industry, where the profit-motive in closed-source medicine can put a serious chilling effect on the development beneficial medicines by limiting access to the results of expensive research projects.

Who said rational self-interest and private capital is necessarily the most efficient model?

Posted by Faber on October 24, 2011 at 9:56 AM

Ultimately the American taxpayer of the 1960s and 70s (my parents) paid for all this technology culminating in the Unix system upon which all modern operating systems are built.

If patent law were at all fair, none of us would have to work, as we would be paid on these same royalties.

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on October 24, 2011 at 11:55 AM

Clearly Gates learned from Getty.

Posted by Sir Vic on October 24, 2011 at 2:54 PM

This is all Google's fault. They had a chance to join Microsoft in the patent bid but they refused to partner with Microsoft and then bid $3.14 on the patents. If Google agreed to partner with Microsoft in the patent bid in the first place, this would not have happened.

Posted by Google acted arrogantly on October 24, 2011 at 8:53 PM