The 2011 purchase of Motorola was mostly a means by Google to get approximately 17,000 patents in order to defend themselves from the numerous lawsuits that were occurring at the time. However, things have significantly quieted down on the legal front and Google is now auctioning some battery-related patents from the purchase.
A German court recently granted an injunction against HTC, and could lead to the Taiwanese manufacturer’s smartphones being taken off shelves in Germany. It’s not exactly the good news HTC was hoping for following a troubled year of slipping market share, dropping revenue and the lukewarm market response to its devices.
Wall Street Journal reports that a patent licensing firm named Acacia Research Group LLC won a lawsuit on November 27 which granted it an injunction against HTC smartphone sales through the country’s biggest telecommunications provider. HTC smartphones sold by Deutsche Telekom are expected to be pulled by the end of this month, although the manufacturer will be appealing to try to overturn the decision. HTC is understandably disappointed by the ruling, and is working with DT to ‘minimize disruption’ to its customers …
A patent recently published by the USPTO and unearthed by Patently Mobile reveals Samsung could have plans to design and build foldable, bendable and scrollable devices with various designs. Of course, the technology underpinning this entire exploration is a flexible display, which made it in to mainstream smartphones a couple of years ago with the Galaxy Round and LG G Curve. More recently, Samsung used it in the Galaxy S6 Edge, but if these designs eventually make it to market, they’ll make the S6 Edge look dull…
Google may have made leaps and bounds already in the development of future automotive technology with its autonomous vehicle program, but that’s not all it’s working on. A patent recently published by the USPTO reveals a concept for an in-car tool which uses your wearable device’s movements to work out if you’re the driver or passenger…
Microsoft and Google have announced that they’re dropping their long-running smartphone and video game console patent disputes. This announcement brings an end to some 20 lawsuits in the States and in Europe. Neither company revealed the exact financial terms, but did announce that instead of fighting each other over technology, that they envisage a future where the work together for the benefit of their customers…
Google today has started a program for startups to gain two non-organic patent families from Google, as well as the opportunity buy more patents from the company at some point down the line. To be eligible however, the interested startup must also join the LOT Network, which includes companies like Dropbox and Canon and focuses on stopping patent trolls (via TechCrunch).
No, we’re not talking about Pied Piper here: Google is being sued by Max Sound Corporation over patented technology which allows for “far more economically efficient transport of digital content due to greatly optimized data capacity.”
The District Court of Mannheim in Germany has scheduled a December 8th hearing for the video streaming patent case against Google and YouTube, which was filed this past December. The whole case will be heard that day and a decision is expected to be brought down a few weeks later.
According to a new report out of Reuters, former Google executive Michelle Lee will become the head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The position, the U.S. Senate says, has been vacant for more than two years. President Barack Obama was responsible for choosing Michelle Lee to head the patent office, with his choice also having been recently approved by the full Senate.
For the past few years, Microsoft has been licensing several of its patents with Android device makers. These agreements reportedly generate around $1 to $2 billion in revenue for the company. The software maker estimates that it has active licensing deals that cover around 70 percent of the Android devices in the US. So far, the company has never outlined what patents are being infringed on by Android, but a recent investigation by China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) has uncovered a stockpile of patents and filings held by Microsoft while reviewing the company’s acquisition of Nokia.
Foxconn, best known for manufacturing Apple products, says that it has sold display patents to Google for an undisclosed sum. Details are vague, with the briefest of statements quoted in the WSJ stating only that they were related to “communications technology.”
Foxconn has been seeking to reduce its dependence on Apple, which provides around 40 percent of its business, with its own product lines. Patent sales provide a further form of diversification for the company, which says that it has been granted more than 64,000 patents to date, and applied for a similar number again.
Google will soon open its Glass explorer program to all US residents for one day only, however a recent patent application from the search engine kingpin might make you reconsider making a purchase tomorrow. Spotted by the folks at Patent Bolt, Google has filed a patent application for a micro camera component to compliment its recently announced smart contact lenses.
Photo: reuters.com
Google’s Open Source Blog advises that Google has moved from an associate to a full board member of the Open Invention Network, an organisation designed to cross-licence Linux patents to reduce the risk of being sued by patent trolls.
Open-source software like Linux has spurred huge innovation in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet in general. Linux now powers nearly all the world’s supercomputers, runs the International Space Station, and forms the core of Android. But as open source has proliferated, so have the threats against it, particularly using patents. That’s why we’re expanding our participation in Open Invention Network (OIN), becoming the organization’s first new full board member since 2007.
Companies that join the network are guaranteed protection from being sued by other members, provided that they make the same promise. Google will now sit alongside IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony on the board.
Google’s former head of patents, Michelle Lee, was recently named as the new interim head of the US Patent & Trademark Office, promising faster processing of applications and ‘higher quality’ patents – diplomatic language for greater barriers to patent trolls.
Google’s former head of patents Michelle Lee has been named as the interim head of the USPTO, starting work there on 13th January, reports Yahoo! Finance.
Although technically Lee is deputy director, the agency hasn’t had a director since David Kappos left back in February, meaning that Lee will be running the show for the immediate future at least.
The appointment is an interesting choice given Google’s vocal criticism of patent trolls …
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Google, Samsung, and several other Android handset manufacturers are being sued by Rockstar, a consortium backed by Android competitors Microsoft and Apple, over alleged infringement of several search patents acquired by Rockstar from Nortel in 2011. Last year HTC reached a ten-year agreement with Apple as part of a patent infringement settlement. That deal would result in both companies licensing existing and future patents from one another, but it seems that agreement does not apply in this case.
In a blog post today, Google announced that its patent search service has added data from four new patent agencies. Starting today, patents from China, Germany, Canada, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are now aggregated in the Google Patents search database. Most of the patents include artwork, as well as text descriptions, which thanks to Google Translate, are available in a variety of languages.
Last year, we launched two improvements to Google Patents: the Prior Art Finder and European Patent Office (EPO) patents. Today we’re happy to announce the addition of documents from four new patent agencies: China, Germany, Canada, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Many of these documents may provide prior art for future patent applications, and we hope their increased discoverability will improve the quality of patents in the U.S. and worldwide.
You can tryout Google Patent search on your own here.
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CNET reports that Microsoft was awarded $14.5 million from Google Motorola for the abuse of the fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) patents by Google.
A federal jury in Seattle ordered the Google-owned handset maker to pay the software giant $14.5 million in damages for breach of contract for failing to license at reasonable terms standard essential patents covering wireless and video technology used in the Xbox game console. However, the award is half the $29 million in damages Microsoft had sought.
If Google didn’t get any value from FRAND patents from Motorola, what did they get?
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Photo: tractoroutdoor.com
The WSJ reports that more than a billion dollars were wiped off Samsung’s market value today following President Obama’s veto of the decision to ban the import of iPhone 4 and 3G iPad 2 devices into the USA. The fall represented 0.9 percent of the company’s market cap.
While a Presidential veto over-rules the original ITC ruling, the Financial Times reports that Samsung is appealing the ITC decision on the grounds that it only upheld one of the four patents it believes Apple has infringed. The appeal is expected to be held in Q1 2014. Were Apple to lose then, however, the impact would be significantly lower, as Apple is almost certain to have launched new iPhones and iPads by then, with the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 likely removed from Apple’s retail and online stores and seeing only residual sales elsewhere …
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Google, a noted supporter of open-source software, has pledged not to sue anyone developing, distributing, or using open-source software that uses any of a specified number of Google patents unless attacked first.
Microsoft requested European Union antitrust regulators to probe Motorola Mobility on claims that the United States phone manufacturer is blocking sales of Windows and Xbox products.
“Earlier today, Microsoft filed a formal competition law complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Motorola Mobility and Google,” wrote Microsoft’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel David Heiner in a blog post this morning. “We have taken this step because Motorola is attempting to block sales of Windows PCs, our Xbox game console and other products.”
Microsoft’s post, “Google: Please Don’t Kill Video on the Web,” lambasted Motorola Mobility for not making industry standard patents available on reasonable and fair terms, and for using those patents to block competitors from shipping products.
The industry apparently agreed many years ago to define common technical standards for everyone to use and build compatible Wi-Fi and video products. However, Heiner contended, Motorola is backtracking on its word and attempting to use standard patents for “killing video on the Web.”
More information is available below.
Google is on a roll these days in regards to interesting patent filings. The company filed a patent for Android’s pattern unlock feature in November, and a new filing suggests more unlocking methods with one involving voice recognition and the other based on a two-icon methodology. Today, Patently Apple pointed to another document the search company filed with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on Sept. 29, 2011.
Being made public only recently, it describes methods and apparatus for a Google TV remote that lets you search for televisions shows, movies, music and other media simply by asking. This sounds a lot like Apple’s Siri voice assistant the rumor-mill speculates could enhance an alleged Apple-branded HD TV set.
The difference, per the publication:
Apple has had a similar feature under Remote for several years now, but it doesn’t relate to live TV as Google’s will. Google’s real competitor on this particular front will come from Samsung who just announced their latest TV remote with voice controls and a touch pad. The race to bring the best next generation TV Remote to market is officially on.
One embodiment of the invention describes a situation where a user searches for the popular sitcom “Seinfeld” simply by asking their Android phone, “When is Seinfeld on?” The phone would parse and send the query up to the Google cloud, beaming down the results to your Google TV set-top box.
GPS positioning could enhance the scope of the invention in interesting ways:
Google acquired 217 patents from IBM, according to SEO by the Sea. Google’s most recent acquisition of patents from IBM, completed in the last week of December, comes after acquiring patents last summer. SEO by the Sea discovered the acquisition from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and we do not know the exact details currently. Google will most likely send out a letter giving exact figures soon.
Of the 217 patents, 188 were granted. Twenty-nine of them are patents pending that have been published. The patents Google acquired range from video conferencing to instant messaging. Some of the noteworthy patents include modifying web pages for mobile devices, collecting data from NFC, rendering a section of a webpage, transferring webpages between mobile devices, voice based keyboard search, and a “computer phone.”
Last summer, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for its 17,000 published patents and almost 7,500 pending patents. The acquisition is still going through, but Google put up $12.5 billion for the company. Google continues to strengthen its patent portfolio to protect itself from lawsuits.
Ever wonder what patents Microsoft has been using to sign up Android vendors such as Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Acer, and over 10 others in cross-licensing agreements? Just last week Barnes & Noble asked US regulators to probe Microsoft’s anti-Android strategy, which sees the company collecting millions in profits from royalties paid by just about anyone shipping Android on their devices.
In their initial letter to the Department of Justice, Barnes & Noble claims Microsoft’s patents “cover only arbitrary, outmoded and non-essential design features,” and today we get a look into exactly what they’re talking about thanks to a detailed report from Groklaw of the exhibits attached to B&N’s letter.
Below B&N walks us through some of the patents Microsoft claims the Nook infringes on and also describes their stance for each. These could very well be some of the same patents the company is using to collect royalties from other Android vendors, patents B&N describe as only covering “trivial and non-essential design elements in Android”.
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All major Android backers are now paying royalties to Microsoft for using Android in smartphones, even the likes of Samsung and HTC. Goldman Sachs estimated the Windows maker could rake in a whopping $444 million this year alone from Android patent pacts, easily exceeding Windows Phone licensing revenues. Now that the $199 Kindle Fire tablet has come into full view, the question arises whether Amazon, too, will run to Microsoft’s arms seeking Android patent protection.
The two companies last year had cut a cross-licensing agreement. However, the Seattle Times notes that the 2010 deal covers the existing Kindle e-readers but not Android, which powers the Kindle Fire tablet. TechCrunch’s MG Seigler, who saw early prototypes of the Fire tablet, described a forked Android version which is at the core of the Kindle Fire experience:
Microsoft just announced a cross-licensing agreement with Samsung. Akin to their patent deals with other Android backers, this one will have Samsung pay per-device royalties for mobile phones and tablets running Android. Microsoft has in total eight cross-licensing agreements with Android backers Acer, General Dynamics Itronix, Onkyo, Velocity Micro, ViewSonic, Wistron, HTC and Samsung.
Microsoft explained in a blog post that the agreement “gives both companies greater patent coverage relating to each other’s technologies, and opens the door to a deeper partnership in the development of new phones for the Windows Phone platform”.
Did the software maker just say that Samsung will focus more on Windows Phone in the future? Per press release, Microsoft and Samsung “agreed to cooperate in the development and marketing of Windows Phone”. Could be just what Microsoft needs given their struggle to keep Nokia afloat. Patent expert Florian Mueller characterized the announcement on his FOSSPatents blog as “the most important Android-related intellectual property deal in its own right”, adding:
If Samsung truly believed that Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility was going to be helpful to the Android ecosystem at large, it would have waited until that deal is closed before concluding the license agreement with Microsoft. But Samsung probably knows it can’t rely on Google. It decided to address Android’s intellectual property issues on its own.
Samsung has circa 28,000 patents in the United States and more than 100,000 patents around the world. Curiously, Microsoft hasn’t targeted Apple’s iOS with its patents so far which leads us to believe that Oracle, Microsoft and Apple may be working together to derail Android or at least make it a pricey proposition for handset makers. Be that as it may, it is going to be interesting seeing how this Microsoft-Samsung patent protection affects the nine Apple vs. Samsung lawsuits in twenty countries around the world…
