This is going to be big. Nov 1, 2013, 10:39am CDT The legal battle Google tried to pay $4.4B to avoid has come Googles battling new patent infringement claims that could make Apple/Samsungs patent war look easy. Enlarge Paolo Vescia Googles battling new patent infringement claims that could make Apple/Samsungs patent war look easy. Jon Xavier Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal Email | Twitter | Google+ Rockstar Bidco, an entity formed by a consortium of tech companies including Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. to oversee the old Nortel patent portfolio, just filed a series of lawsuits against Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and its Android partners alleging infringement on 14 different patents. This one’s big. If you want to think of patent suits in the terms of geopolitical conflict, then the eight lawsuits Rockstar filed in the Eastern District of Texas Thursday amount to the opening salvo of a nuclear holocaust. Seven of the patents hit at the core of Google’s business: its search engine. The earliest of these dates to 1997, a full year before Google was founded. Rockstar alleges that Google’s search product infringes on these “associative search engine” patents, especially AdWords, the search advertising system that accounts for more than 80 percent of Google’s revenue. The patents being levied against Google’s handset partners are more varied, but include cell phone hardware, graphical interface navigation elements, an integrated messaging center, and some networking protocols. Rockstar has named seven companies as parties in its lawsuit: Asustek, HTC, Huawei, LG Electronics, Pantech, Samsung and ZTE. Part of the problem for Google, which has an office in Austin, in this case is that its history with this patent portfolio works against it. When Nortel went bankrupt and its patents came up to auction in 2011, Google jumped at the chance to pick up its treasure trove of 6,000 patents, some of which included foundational Internet technologies. It actually won the initial stocking horse bid by opening with an offer of $900 million, but lost out in the subsequent bidding war. Its final bid of $4.4 billion was trumped when Microsoft, Apple, Ericsson and Sony joined forces to create Rockstar, which picked up the portfolio for $4.5 billion. That loss is actually thought to be part of the reason behind Google’s $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility purchase — by snapping up another huge patent portfolio, Google was hoping to create a mutually-assured destruction situation where it could deter attacks with the threat of its own impressive countersuit. Guess that didn’t work out so well. Since Google was willing to pay a high price for these patents, it’s going to have a hard time arguing they’re worthless and invalid, as Google would normally do. That fact isn’t lost on Rockstar’s lawyers, either. They specifically mention Google’s history with the patents in question in their complaint. So how big could this decision be? It’s hard to say, but it could potentially dwarf Apple’s $1 billion victory over Samsung last year. Rockstar’s lawyers have a history of getting big settlements for clients. Susman Godfrey, the law firm in the Google suit, is also representing Internet pioneer Paul Allen in what has been called “the mother of all patent suits.” McKool Smith, the firm going after the manufacturers, successfully sued Apple for $368 million on behalf of VirnetX last year.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 12:47:09 +0000
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