After losing in its bid to buy the lucrative patent portfolio from bankrupt Nortel, Google has now come out vocally against its largest rivals alleging that they banded together just to prevent the internet search giant from gaining an upper hand in the highly competitive smartphone market. David Drummond, the Chief Legal Officer at Google, was involved in a public outburst as he blasted Apple, Microsoft and Oracle along with other smaller companies of conspiring to hurdle the skyrocketing demand for Android platform through buying up patents related to mobile technologies used by it.
This effectively lead to the imposition of a tax, in form of royalties, to the mobile platform, hampering its progress. Along with increasing the costs incurred by the consumers, he said that the ownership of the said patents by these companies will stifle innovation. He wrote in his blog post that Apple and Microsoft have always been bitter rivals, so when they join hands for a shared cause, it is worth wondering about the reason behind it. He called it an organized, hostile attack against Android by companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and others which are being carried out through ambiguous patents.
Brad Smith, the General Counsel for Microsoft, however, disagreed with Drummond’s views on the Novell patent buyout. He said that Google accusations of the company having bought the patents specifically to prevent the Android owner from getting them was false as Microsoft had earlier approached Google itself for making a joint bid, to which Google refused.
There was no comment from either Apple or Oracle. Google, the defendant in an anti-trust lawsuit in the market for internet search which it currently leads, is racing ahead of its competition in the global smartphone market. However, its progress has been regularly hampered due to the company’s lack of a competent stockpile of intellectual property related to wireless communications, which has made it very vulnerable to patent infringement suits by companies like Oracle.
The company failed to secure the Nortel patent portfolio, succumbing to a loss against the bid by the group of Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and several other companies who paid a total of $4.5 billion for the package. According to sources close to the company, Google’s individual bid had reached an amount of $3.4 billion before it teamed up with Intel, who had itself bid $3.1 billion.
