



I. Monopoly is Almost in Apple's Grasp




Apple gavel





II. Ubiquitous Patent Won't Expire Until 2028



Apple iPhone 4S
[Image Source: Carlos Rull]



III. How Did We Get Here?




Apple iPhone
[Image Source: David Paul Morris/Getty Images]





Game over



Source: FOSS Patents

Comments     Threshold


RE: If I have to get a Windows Phone,
By Daemyion on 4/3/2012 9:27:15 AM , Rating: 2
I'm pretty sure there's a cross-licensing agreement already in place between Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft's patents in OS, touch inputs (MS began work on Surface in 2001), UI, and other fields pretty much compels Apple to broadly cross-license if they ever want to get a decent product out.

What I still don't get is why Google didn't do the necessary due diligence ahead of time. If they licensed the patents before announcing Android they would; A) pay less per patent and B) avoid this mess completely. They're pretty naive, tbh.

RE: If I have to get a Windows Phone,
By sviola on 4/3/2012 10:39:20 AM , Rating: 3
They are not naive, they just thought they could get away. They did the same with Java.

RE: If I have to get a Windows Phone,
By JasonMick (blog) on 4/3/2012 11:35:40 AM , Rating: 1

Err, with Java, they thought it was okay because the chief executive of Sun said it was, although they never obtain an explicit legalese licensing consent in writing. So naive would be the appropriate term.

Sun never sued Google. But Google miscalculated and after Oracle purchased Sun it was indeed sued.

By adiposity on 4/3/2012 1:55:25 PM , Rating: 2

We know, based on the infamous e-mail, that the licensing of Java was a concern at Google. We don't know whether anyone considered Schwartz’s comments a license to use Java.

His comments are damaging to their credibility, and possibly their case, though. And frankly, I think by making their own "non-JVM," they may well have circumvented the need to license anything.

It's possible that Schwartz wanted Google to license the mobile JVM at the same time as he was happy that Google was giving Java increased relevance. The two are not mutually exclusive. Sun may very well have suggested to Oracle that Google's failure to license the JVM was a selling point in the acquisition. We don't know.

By Tony Swash on 4/3/2012 2:08:17 PM , Rating: 2

So they thought that basing the legal position of a multibillion dollar initiative on someone's blog post was OK?

So naive would be the appropriate term.

Possibly. Google's internal decision making was very poor and fragmented and they seemed to have stumbled into a vast undertaking with Android that has never made them any money. But I think that Google playing fast and loose with other people's intellectual property is a reflection of a very deeply embedded culture at Google that basically thinks that all IP (other than Google's own search algorithms obviously) is up for grabs and that IP protection is somehow old fashioned and can be routed around. Google is a company whose entire business is based on collecting other people's information and becoming an intermediary in everything everybody does with anything. 'Borrowing' code from Java was just part of the way the company does things. It genuinely sees nothing wrong with it. The business models of all other companies are just irritants to Google that just gets in the way of it's mission which is to manage the entire worlds data. All of it.

