Much like Apple, Microsoft (MS) has been litigation happy against Android regarding patents since its inception. Unlike Apple though, MS has been a little more civil about it and sees patent cases as an opportunity to profit from Android’s success rather than an attempt to crush it (most of the time). In the case of MS at least, winning cases typically leads to an injunction which almost always leads to the sale of royalties for patents though licensing agreements via their Intellectual Property Licensing Group.
One of the most widely known of these agreements in the Android world was the deal that MS struck with HTC in 2010. MS makes $5 off of every HTC phone that is sold; the more HTC devices that sell, the more money MS makes, win-win for everybody. Occasionally though, injunctions do not lead to licensing agreements and end up having Apple-like bans much like what just happened in Germany.
MS has always gone after manufacturers specifically and now they’re after Motorola Mobility (Moto). Well, since Moto was recently purchased by Google, MS will be in court against Google directly from beginning to end regarding Android in a new case regarding geo-tagging. This will be in Munich, Germany regarding a maps feature on Moto devices that deals with the method of how two sets of overlayed data called from two separate data bases are displayed. This will be the first time that MS and Google have faced off from the beginning of a case. All prior cases regarding MS and Google were started between MS and Moto, only to be carried over by default to Google after the Moto acquisition.
Patent litigation is long, strenuous, complicated, and very hard to follow. The FOSS Patents blog has compiled a list of patent cases regarding Android specifically. It’s insane the amount of litigation occurring, check out the list here.
Sources: Mercury News and FOSS Patents
