Concern grows that lawsuits are stifling opportunity and hurting consumers by raising prices
Google's chief lawyer Kent Walker says that the smartphone industry is using patents in an arms race that is "gumming up the works of innovation" and that the US government needs to rein in their use.
The company is facing a huge lawsuit from database company Oracle, which is claiming billions in damages over what it says is infringement in Google's widely-used Android operating system, while handset makers such as HTC and Samsung face claims from companies including Microsoft that their Android devices infringe its software patents.
"It's hard to find what's the best path – there's so much litigation," Walker said in an interview with the wire agency Bloomberg. "We're exploring a variety of different things."
But Walker said that patents meant "the tech industry has a significant problem" and that "software patents are kind of gumming up the works of innovation."
Google lost out in an auction of Nortel patents at the beginning of July when a consortium including Apple and Microsoft bid $4.5bn for the rights covering a number of mobile phone technologies.
Walker declined to say whether Google will bid for InterDigital - a patent-holding company which has filed suit against Nokia and China's Huawei – or the digital-imaging patents of Eastman Kodak, or any other specific portfolio. He said it's unclear if the $4.5 billion winning bid for the Nortel patents is a sign that other sales will be equally large. "We want to be disciplined about how we approach all this stuff," Walker said. "We're looking for a reasonable alternative, but we want to make sure Google, and the companies Google partners with, aren't shut out of the opportunity to bring great new products and features to consumers."
But the problem of software patents in particular is increasingly seen as a drag on innovation within the US. After a US-based company, Lodsys, which holds some patents that may be infringed in smartphone apps, sued independent developers, a number of British developers withdrew their products from US sale, saying the cost of business there was too high.
Software patents such as Lodsys's are not directly applicable in Europe, but there are fears that attempts by the US to align patent law will bring them in and have the same chilling effect now being seen across the Atlantic.
Android is now the most widely used mobile operating system, with 38.9% of the worldwide smartphone market, compared with 18.2% for Apple's iPhone, which has passed Nokia's formerly dominant Symbian, according to research firm IDC.
But beneath the sales figures, a furious set of patent battles is continuing. Apple has ongoing patent cases against Samsung Electronics, HTC and Motorola Mobility Holdings over their Android-based phones; each has in response filed patent suits against Apple. Microsoft and Motorola Mobility also have filed patent suits against each other; Microsoft has successfully sued HTC and extracted a per-handset royalty on its Android handsets, and is now suing Samsung. Nokia won a patent settlement from Apple which gave it a €448m boost to its quarterly results. And Microsoft has a pending complaint against Barnes & Noble over its Nook e-reader.
The cases have been filed with the International Trade Commission, which has the power to block imports of products found to infringe U.S. patents.
"Each side can blow the other up on some level - everybody can block the other's products from coming to market," Walker said. "You create this mutually assured destruction scenario, but it's very expensive to get all those munitions."
Google has been hesitant to use patents to file suits against other companies, he said.
"Buying patents so you can hit the other guy, it's not good form," Walker said. "You hate to unilaterally disarm here, but we haven't in our history."
The company is providing support and technical help to companies that make products for the Android operating system and are being sued, either by rival companies such as Apple and Microsoft, or by small patent owners that don't make products.
"We'll be fine," Walker said. "We have the resources to balance the scales here."
--
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/26/google-software-patents-warning
~
Manage subscription | Powered by rssforward.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment