Google has attacked Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle for imposing what it calls a patent ‘tax’ on Android customers.
In a post on the Official Google Blog, David Drummond, the company’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, said that Android’s success had ‘yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.’
Among the causes of Google’s anger is the recent acquisition by companies including Apple and Microsoft of patents once held by Nortel and Novell. Drummond also hit out at the deal which Microsoft struck with Android smartphone manufacturer, HTC, last year which sees HTC pay Microsoft a licence fee, believed to be between $5 and $15, for every Android phone it sells. He also referenced ongoing disputes between HTC and Apple and Apple and Samsung.
Drummond referred to the auction of Nortel patents, in which Google, having bid sums equivalent to mathematically significant numbers such as pi, $3.14bn, eventually lost out to the consortium led by Microsoft and Apple. ‘This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they’re really worth. The winning $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion,’ he wrote.
Google asserts that Android is free and open source and can be licensed by anyone, which makes it attractive to handset manufacturers and allows them to sell devices to customers more cheaply than those running iOS and Windows Phone 7. Its competitors claim, however, that Android infringes on a number of their patents and that it cannot be used without licensing those patents.
