Just in time to become a rather strange Christmas present, Google has filed a lawsuit against Rockstar, a company that has sued Google and its Android OEM partners over a variety of patents owned by the now bankrupt Nortel Networks. Aside from the legalese saying how its Nexus devices do not infringe on those patents, Google is calling out Rockstar for what it really is: a patent troll.

In its lawsuit, Google describes Rockstar as a company that produces nothing and practices none of the patents it owns. Instead, it uses its resources to scour the industry to look for any opportunity to coerce other companies to pay up licensing fees or get sued, the very definition of a patent troll. That is exactly how Google and some of its partners including as HTC, Huawei, and Samsung have fallen under Rockstar’s radars.

Google is also complaining how the patent suit is specifically singling out Android and the manufacturers that ship it, casting a shroud of doubt and uncertainty over the platform. In fact, Google claims that those patents might apply to a larger list of technologies and mobile platforms that Rockstar has conveniently left out of its hit list. This accusation sounds believable considering Rockstar is a consortium made up of Apple, Blackberry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony.

That image of being merely a patent troll, something that is looked down upon nowadays, is something Rockstar might be trying to shake off with little success. It has recently been reported to be trying to sell off items in its patent portfolio, except of course those related to the Google lawsuit. Unfortunately for the consortium, the rest of the industry doesn’t seem that interested.

VIA: The Verge

2 COMMENTS

  1. Nortel, which is the ancestor of RockStar, invented thousands of times more things than Google has. That’s why Google was one of the bidders for the Nortel patents, bidding Billions of dollars for them. That’s right, Billions. And now the patents are so worthless of course that Google shouldn’t pay any royalties on them. . . Right . . .

    • Nortel was no different with its “inventions” that any other telco of its time. Mass filing thousands of patents of obvious solutions with the help of a league of lawyers harassing the engineers to patent whatever thought they had. And this was done in name of “defence” where the size of the arsenal mattered more than quality.

      Out of the 6000 thousand so called patents Nortel had and sold, you’d be hard pressed to find even a single original invention.

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