[Article first published as Useless Patent Wars - Motorola Awarded Unenforceable Injunction
against Microsoft on Blogcritics.]
Every day I peruse the tech news on the interwebs to keep up
with what’s going on. There are usually a few interesting stories on some
sort of technology development or new games coming out, but what I’ve found
over the last year is that those types of stories have been dwarfed in number
by news on the business side of technology. Now I’m not saying that’s a
bad thing – I’m both a nerd and a business guy so that intersection of topics
definitely interests me. But it’s the stories that accompany the ones
about tech business dealings that make my head hurt. And all of those
stories are on tech patents and lawsuits.
There’s a certain extent to which a defense of patents and
intellectual property is reasonable. That’s the point of the patent
system as it was designed – to defend inventors from someone else taking the
idea and running with it for profit, protecting them from being victims of
corporate theft and economies of scale. And that works for the most part
when it comes to tangible goods or the processes to manufacture said
goods. But trying to apply that same system to technology, namely
software, unfortunately can become nothing short of a series of legal
quagmires. Patents can be awarded to very broad solutions and nebulous ideas that there’s no present method to develop, or that could possibly have multiple
methods of execution. Put those patents in the hands of patent trolls and watch them kick back, send their
legal attack dogs, and either kill a dream for kicks or pick up
royalties. And in my personal, non-lawyer opinion, I can see how that
could stifle and suppress innovation in startups and small firms, who simply
can’t afford a potential patent lawsuit from a larger company with deeper
pockets. Something has to change.
It’s nothing new. I know, as you all do, that this
type of thing has been going on more and more as the mobile space has grown.
But that doesn’t preclude me from reading the news and cringing a little
bit when i see some of the fallout. Today was such a day with such
stories that irked my nerdy ire. Motorola Mobility, the broken-off mobile
piece of the once whole Motorola, and who i will be referring to as “MoMo” for
the rest of this, won an injunction against Microsoft in Germany. The
injunction is in the form of a sales ban covering Xbox 360 game consoles, the Windows
7 line of operating systems, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player in
Germany. That means every Xbox 360 and every copy of Windows 7 would have
to be taken off the shelves. The reason? H.264 video. For those not
in the know, H.264 is a video codec that covers many aspects of HD video.
One of its claims to fame comes thanks to Blu-Ray players, which all have to be
able to decode H.264 video streams. Online video content delivery through
Flash and sites like YouTube use H.264 to get it done too.
What MoMo sued for wasn’t actually for H.264 itself, but two
patents that they hold for the delivery of H.264 video.
Their claim is that Microsoft never properly licensed said technologies, and
have convinced a Mannheim Court in Germany of that as well. But it’s not
that simple. A United States court has banned MoMo from enforcing that injunction
until they review the matter next week. And in the meantime, Microsoft
has gone ahead and moved their European software distribution center from
Germany to the Netherlands to mitigate the action. You see, earlier on
Microsoft previously accused MoMo of abusing its FRAND obligations – providing
licensing under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms to licensors as
a standard setting entity. According to Microsoft, those licensing fees
from MoMo would come with a price tag in the neighborhood of $4 billion.
So in addition to the German court and US court, the European Commission could
also look into this, as they’re already carrying out a probe on MoMo’s supposed
“abuse of a dominant market position.” This is the first step in what is
sure to be a long and hugely drawn out process.
On another level, trying to ban Windows 7? You're
telling me MoMo is 100% Mac and Linux in their enterprise setup?
But that wasn’t all for today. Another report featured Nokia’s new patent assault against HTC, RIM and
Viewsonic for infringement on 45 patents in their portfolio. They’ve
already been successful once in suing Apple into a licensing deal for the iPhone, but details on which 45 patents
have yet to be released at the time of my writing this. Now this one I
can sort of understand. It looks like they’re trying to
mitigate some financial hits with some additional revenue streams until the
Lumia becomes more widely popular. So while this one didn’t strike a
nerve as badly, it still made me shake my head a little.
It just seems to me that the undeniable amount of effort
(not to mention cash money) funneled into patent assaults could be redirected
into more product development. There’s a lot of really basic things the
mobile world has yet to figure out, like coming up with technologies
for things like more efficient batteries. Put more effort into putting
quality products into the hands of the consumers, not quality money into the
hands of your lawyers. Think about the good of the game.
