“Major news agencies (Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Reuters) report on a ‘settlement offer’ that Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility made Microsoft, and Microsoft’s response, describing this as ‘little more than an effort to change the subject’ at time when antitrust authorities are increasingly concerned over standard-essential patents (SEP) abuse,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents.
“I’ll get to the numbers involved in a moment, but the very first indication that Google (Motorola) didn’t really mean this offer to be acceptable is that the offers parties make during the course of real settlement talks are held confidential and not shared with news agencies on the record,” Mueller reports. “All that gets announced at the end of real settlement talks is that there is a deal, and the most that will be said about the terms is an indication as to which party ends up the net payer, without staying dollar/cent amounts. The Apple-Nokia settlement is a representative example.”
Mueller reports, “The only reason why someone would make such an offer public is to play a perception game in the political arena. In this case, obvious motivations would be to influence decisions (such as by discouraging regulators from taking forceful action) and, possibly, to set the stage for aggressive measures such as new court filings or enforcement initiatives.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The saga continues.
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