Google goes into legal battle over Android patents

[Ichtyandr]

As recently posted on their blog Google wants to battle with patent claims on their Android arguing that they are motivated by anti-competitive motives (surprise). It is interesting that in order to do so they look at how Novell's patents were acquired, and say that quote: "We’re encouraged that the Department of Justice forced the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms, and that it’s looking into whether Microsoft and Apple acquired the Nortel patents for anti-competitive means."
full post is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-android.html
I wonder how this could affect Ubuntu, which could face similar anti-competitive moves should it seriously challenge Microsoft on desktop market as intended.

[zekopeko]

As recently posted on their blog Google wants to battle with patent claims on their Android arguing that they are motivated by anti-competitive motives (surprise). It is interesting that in order to do so they look at how Novell's patents were acquired, and say that quote: "We’re encouraged that the Department of Justice forced the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms, and that it’s looking into whether Microsoft and Apple acquired the Nortel patents for anti-competitive means."
full post is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-android.html

This looks contradictory to me. Not to mention hypocritical. First of all patents are legal monopolies. How many Nortel patents are hardware patents and how many software? Are hardware patents also "dubious"? I would like to know what is the legal standard for using patents for anti-competitive purposes as opposed to using them for what they were designed for.

Second of all Google has exclusive right on their PageRank indexing algorithms and probably owns many (software) search patents. I don't remember reading how they licensed those patents to their competitors to foster a more competitive market. They instead used them exactly for the same thing they are accusing those companies here: to block competitors from that technology.


I wonder how this could affect Ubuntu, which could face similar anti-competitive moves should it seriously challenge Microsoft on desktop market as intended.

I remember reading that Canonical was uninterested in litigation and wants to compete on features and quality.

EDIT: Looks like Google really are hypocritical: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/08/microsoft-calls-google-out-over-patent-bullying-accusations.ars