Back in 2011, Apple, Microsoft, and Sony outbid Google to take charge of Nortel's mobile patents. The trio paid a combination of $4.5 billion for the patents, and began an industry consortium that goes by the name Rockstar. With the new patents, the consortium made the first move against Google, HTC, Huawei and Samsung for allegedly infringing the Nortel patents. However, Google is not taking this lying down. The search engine giant is fighting back by suing the Rockstar consortium for being a shell patent troll for both Apple and Microsoft.
Google believes these companies want to see Android products pulled from shelves, and that's why Rockstar had filed the lawsuit against it and other Android vendors.
"Rockstar produces no products and practices no patents," Google's court filings read. "Instead, Rockstar employs a staff of engineers in Ontario, Canada, who examine other companies' successful products to find anything that Rockstar might use to demand and extract licenses to its patents under threat of litigation."
Google went on to add the following: "Among the myriad companies ensnared in Rockstar's patent dragnet are customers and partners of Google who use the Android platform in their devices, including ASUS, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung, and ZTE."
It is not certain how far Google will get with its push to protect itself and its partners from Rockstar's death rays, but one thing is for certain, Google is in a huge mess that it needs to escape from. If Apple, Microsoft and Sony get their way, Android could be in serious danger. No wonder, Google was aiming to acquire these very same patents that are now being used against it. One has to wonder how different the technology world would have been had Google bought the Nortel patents instead.
Florian Mueller explains it best: "Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility, hoping to gain leverage from its patent trove. It won hardly anything in court, and currently has zero enforceable injunctions in place against Apple and Microsoft. Motorola's overly aggressive use of patents on industry standards, which are subject to licensing commitments, drew antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. and in Europe. This behavior may explain why six major industry players, including one Google hardware partner, formed the Rockstar Consortium to clear the market of the Nortel patents. Google's original plan was to do with the far more powerful Nortel portfolio what it then did with Motorola's weak tea. A whole industry could have been held hostage to Google's Android patent infringement strategy."
