Microsoft Sues Motorola Over Android-Related Patent Infringement 199
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Engadget:
"Microsoft has hit up the ITC over a total of nine alleged patent infringements by Motorola in its Android devices, specifically relating to 'synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.' This should be interesting — will it result in a quick cross-licensing agreement, or a protracted court battle spanning multiple years?"
The ITC complaint was accompanied by a lawsuit in US District Court. Microsoft's Horacio Gutierrez explained the company's reasoning in a blog post.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't someone just post in the thread about Microsoft's indemnification promise that no one had ever sued a handset maker for patent infringement?
I read that post too [slashdot.org]. It said that no one had ever successfully sued a handset maker who used Linux systems for patent infringement. That remains true unless Microsoft prevails in this suit.
Re:Enemy of My Enemy, etc... (Score:3, Informative)
Some picking apart may be in order here...
[...] I don't think Apple cares if they ever quite reach #1 in the smartphone market, or any market.
Since we're picking things apart, perhaps you should acknowledge that Apple is very definitely #1 in the most important facet of "market share," namely share of industry profits, beating out Nokia, Saumsung, and LG combined. I contend it's a metric they most certainly care about.
See the pretty graphs at
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/09/21/pie-chart-apples-outrageous-share-of-the-mobile-industrys-profits/ [cnn.com]
Holy shit (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't think this
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1805678&cid=33762968 [slashdot.org]
would become reality so fast
The Patents (Score:2, Informative)
5,579,517 "Common Name Space for Long and Short File Names"
5,758,352 "Common Name Space for Long and Short File Names"
So, these two are the the infamous FAT patents.
6,621,746 "Monitoring Entropic Conditions of a Flash Memory Device as an Indicator for Invoking Erasure Operations"
Defrag applied to flash, really that deserve a patent?
6,826,762 "Radio Interface Layer in a Cell Phone with a Set of APIs Having a Hardware-Independent Proxy Layer and a Hardware-Specific Driver Layer"
Hmmm layering an API so that you have an invariant user space API and hardware driver portion. Seems like the kind of thing every OS does.
6,909,910 "Method and System for Managing Changes to a Contact Database"
Really!?!? I wonder how if my first year CS course work violates this patent.
7,644,376 "Flexible Architecture for Notifying Applications of State Changes"
Hmmmm... a publish/subscriber notification protocol, no that has never been done before.
5,664,133 "Context Sensitive Menu System/Menu Behavior"
Ha, Ha, Ha Context sensitive menus! I could have sworn I have seen things like that for the last 20 years or so.
6,578,054 "Method and System for Supporting Off-line Mode of Operation and Synchronization Using Resource State Information"
Hmmm... patenting persistent state storage as part of a synchronization process. Hmmmm... I wonder if any of the hash based synchronizer I have built in the past would infringe.
6,370,566 "Generating Meeting Requests and Group Scheduling from a Mobile Device"
Oh, doing it from a mobile device makes it so much more unique.
They are all garbage patents and if Motorola decides to fight versus cross licensing, I don't believe they will hold up.
Re:Enemy of My Enemy, etc... (Score:3, Informative)
As I understand, the income figures were culled from public filings. Estimation of income would only come into play when reconciling accounting rules between countries.