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Google and some of the top makers of Android smartphones are now facing lawsuits over the technology used in their devices.

A few years ago a coalition of companies including Microsoft, Apple, and RIM (now known as BlackBerry) spend $4.5 billion to acquire patents from Nortel, a company that had gone out of business. Then they set up a company called Rockstar.

Now Rockstar is using those patents to try to sue their competitors into oblivion, alleging all kinds of patent infringement. Google, on the other hand, has access to plenty of its own patents (it’s one of the reasons the company spent $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola). So a series of countersuits seems possible.

Round and round she goes…

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5 replies on “Lilbits (11-01-2013): Rockstar patent suit”

  1. Google and Moto have been filing plenty of patent suits of their own.

    Perhaps they’ll all get sick of fighting and instead put their energy into reforming the patent system. Yeah, like that’ll ever happen…

  2. Didn’t Google have the opportunity to join this group when the Nortel patents were purchased? And they decided not to.

    1. they would not be worth 4.5B if that were the case, period. google bid 3.14B, iirc. the point of the acqusitions were to put android out of the game. if “google” were invited to participate, it would have been under conditions worth the silly 3.14B bid, like maybe they would have no choice in the matter of suing their manufacturers, or w/e. i mean you can call this wild speculation, but billions aren’t plunked down for no reason (except unless you’re HP), and if google were to be included with truly no strings attached, we wouldn’t have been talking billions.

      1. (*that is to say, conditions worth having control over bypassing, and buying out)

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