At first there was the US Department of Justice, then there was the European Union. More recently there have been battles with HTC, Samsung, Motorola and now a war of attrition seems to be building with Google.
Microsoft’s lawyers must be laughing all the way to the bank. Work never seems to dry up and there is one case after another after another.
Today, Google have filed Google an EU antitrust complaint over the use of ‘patent trolls’ by Nokia and Microsoft whilst sharing the same concerns in the US.
Google claim in an official statement:
“Nokia and Microsoft are colluding to raise the costs of mobile devices for consumers, creating patent trolls that side-step promises both companies have made. They should be held accountable, and we hope our complaint spurs others to look into these practices.”
Patent trolling is when patents are bought by companies who are not using them in any way and then try to claim licensing fees or to enforce patent rights. This follows in the wake of a Microsoft victory in the German courts against the recently acquired Motorola Mobility with regards to a patent relating to the splitting of text messages into multiple parts. This also comes hot on the heels of the revelation that Microsoft still have over 500,000 links to web pages showing on Bing that they have previously asked Google to remove from their search results. The battles go on and the only people getting richer are the lawyers. Meanwhile funds are diverted from other budgets in order to pay for the expensive and costly court cases and the only people to really suffer are the consumers in the form of higher prices or products not as good as they could be due to the fear of litigation. The wars must stop and the sooner the better.