On Wednesday, David Drummond, Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal guy, posted “When patents attack Android” on the Official Google Blog. In it, he accused Microsoft, Apple and others of a “hostile, organized campaign... waged through bogus patents”.
Microsoft responded with the assertion that it offered to team up with Google to grab some Novell-owned patents, and now David has updated his original post. He’s still not happy.
David explains: “A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners.
“Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn't fall for it.
“Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forcing Microsoft to sell the patents it bought and demanding that the winning group (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, EMC) give a license to the open-source community.
“This only reaffirms our point: Our competitors are waging a patent war on Android and working together to keep us from getting patents that would help balance the scales.”
Microsoft’s David Shaw suggests that the real reason Google didn’t want to team up was because “they wanted to buy something that they could use to assert against someone else. So partnering with others & reducing patent liability across industry is not something they wanted to help do.”
Is anyone else really sick of all this patent bickering? Yup, me too.
via: All Things D
