Google wants 2.25% of every iPhone sale for its Motorola Mobility FRAND patents. “It’s not enough that Google borrowed the phone’s look and feel to make Android?” Phillip Elmer-Dewitt ask for Fortune.
“2.25% of the selling price of the product as a whole,” FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller writes, “is absolutely out of step with the concept of FRAND and with industry practice.”
P.E.D. writes, “One can only imagine what Steve Jobs would say to Google’s latest gambit. The proprietary technology he felt Google had ‘stolen’ (his word) from Apple to build Android was original work, and not something Apple had asked to be made an industry standard. To try to create an equivalence with so-called essential patents — at least one of which dates back to the age of the pager — that Motorola promised at the time to share fairly with all comers may be the modern definition of chutzpah.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers… Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation… This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they’re really worth… Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop. – David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, after Apple and others acquired Novell’s patent portfolio, August 3, 2011
How’s your foot taste, Davey?
Related articles:
Apple gets support from Cisco on need to curb FRAND abuse – February 9, 2012
Apple asked standards body to set rules for essential FRAND patents – February 8, 2012
Motorola Mobility wants 2.25% of Apple’s sales for standards-essential wireless patents license – February 4, 2012
Google legal honcho: Apple, Oracle, Microsoft use ‘bogus patents’ to wage hostile campaign against sainted Android – August 3, 2011