By The mobile patent wars continue to escalate and as Barnes & Noble is fighting back against Microsoft and Nokia, only this time, B&N are putting their foot on the ground in the name of the entire Android universe. The Book and Nook seller has responded to a patent infringement suit by Microsoft that aims to expose the tech giant for scheming to undermine the entire Android movement by pursuing infringement suits that are of an absurd nature.
Then B&N goes one step further by naming Microsoft’s partner in crime: Nokia.
In their official response (found on Groklaw.net), Barnes and Noble alleges that Microsoft and Nokia agreed upon a strategy to launch a coordinated offensive using their combined patent power that would dominate and control open source operating systems by demanding exorbitant licens fees and absurd licensing restrictions for what it asserts are “trivial, not infringed and invalid” lawsuits.
Microsoft re-responded with the following:
Our lawsuits against Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec are founded upon their actions, and the issue is their infringement of our intellectual property rights. In seeking to protect our intellectual property, we are doing what any other company in our situation would do.
If by “any other company” you mean “Nokia” and by “in our situation” you mean “royally screwed because we have created a sub-par product for a decade and now that other companies decide to innovate and succeed we are jealous, on the outside looking in, and only sold about twelve Kin Phones” then I agree.
But who knows what Microsoft considers “in our position”… maybe they consider their current 100,000 units/month a huge success. Note to Microsoft: Over a year ago, Android was activating more than that daily. Bitter much?
[Thanks Steve!]
Hey Rob, I hate to be a stickler, but that’s some pretty poor grammar in your first sentence. Good article though. (Go ahead and delete this post after fixing your first sentence. Thanks).
The second sentence is pretty sub-par, too. lol
Sentence 4 is looking shaky too… ;)
Was there a 5th sentence? lol
Its spelled “license”
The department of redundancy department at Phandroid wishes to thank you. :)
I find it a bit funny that a bookseller has gone and called out Microsoft and defended Android, but I have no problem with it at all. Great job, Barnes and Noble.
How is it funny? The Nook Color is an Android tablet
If by “any other company” you mean “Nokia” and by “in our situation” you mean “royally screwed because we have created a sub-par product for a decade and now that other companies decide to innovate and succeed we are jealous, on the outside looking in, and only sold about twelve Kin Phones” then I agree.
Had me cracking up. I love this site.
The US Patent system is patently silly. Most software patents should have never been granted as they are just how you implement something when writing code and not unique at all. This is all about greed and power by corporations, the latter which should probably have been kept to the size and life span that they founding fathers of the country thought was fair.
I have a patent on the idea of a patent! You cannot speak about this! I’m suing you now!
I have a patent on suing, give me monies!
Just goes to show that it’s become “If you can’t beat them, screw them with IP lawsuits.” Gotta get money somehow right?
Microsoft is pissing me off. Keep it up and ill drop windows too, asses.
Why wait for them to keep it up? You know they will. Drop Windows now.
When are they gonna whip it out to see who has the biggest e-peen?
1. Does this mean Groklaw is going to keep on going
2. I’ve said it before this may be Microsoft’s last troll. I bet they didn’t expect this at all.
They have been running around pulling this crap on smaller companies that use Linux. But they always hide the patents in question by making the company sign an NDA to settle out of court. The companies are normally small enough that they won’t go to court and settle. So for all this time we have never known just what these patents are. Now if B&N doesn’t back down either MS will have to or they will have to take it to court and expose the patents. The way they’ve been hiding them I imagine they are weak or the Linux community could code around them. Even if the patents this time are at the Android level with Android being open source you’d still have a community of modders as well as corporations coding around the patents.
Sorry MS….looks like you picked on the wrong company this time. I hope money gets dumped into a fund B&N to go to court and expose this crap once and for all.
I think at this point Microsoft needs to break apart to save their name. Microsoft phones…LAME. XBOX…pretty cool. Windows 7…a pretty good OS (coming from a mac user).
microsucks
everyone that purchase a computer that has windows on it and is going to run a different OS needs to make sure they get their refund for the license of windows–MS is required to refund anyone that asks for the windows shipped on a computer if you are not going to use it. . . . I’ll be sticking with Linux.
They are scared..!!! of ANDROID
Go Barnes & Noble! That is what I am talking about!
Microsoft is crying of spilt milk because its mobile OS is floundering. Boo hoo and grow up.
I was puzzled by the Microsoft-Nokia deal in which Nokia dropped its mobile operating systems for the failed Microsoft Windows phone 7 mobile operating system. It made absolutely no sense for Nokia to a declining but still huge market share for a Microsoft mobile OS which has proved very unpopular in the market. The $1 billion Microsoft payment to Nokia would not at first glance seem to be adequate to compensate Nokia for the inevitable loss in market share that would result in the dropping of Symbian, particularly when other mobile phone manufacturers like HTC, Samsung etc. also market Windows phone 7 and these have failed to sell. If Windows phone 7 did inexplicably suddenly start selling, then Nokia would not have the Windows market to itself but would have to compete with those manufacturers. The Microsoft-Nokia deal just didn’t seem to make sense – until now. It only makes sense in the context of Microsoft-Nokia cartel coordinating patent trolling activities under a secret agreement in order to unfairly exclude Android and Apple from the market, in much the same way that the MPEG-LA cartel is trying to form a patent cartel to exclude Google’s royalty free VP8 video codec from the market, and in the same way that Microsoft attempted to form a cartel using Novell’s patents to exclude free and fair competition from Linux.
The collusive use of patents in such anti-competitive cartels is of course illegal, but Microsoft seems to have bought and paid for the DoJ given what they got away with last time. This DoJ oversight however collusive with Microsoft, is now about to expire, and it looks like Microsoft is getting ready for another major bout of unrestricted criminal activity on the anti-trust front to coincide with this.
Microsoft + Mobile Phones = FAIL!!!
MS enjoyed the 2 OS world for like “ever”… doing away with competition in the most ruthless and most prejudicial manner. That has never changed! They have a simple plan, if they’re better, buy em out and make it disappear or smash em to bits and accomplish the same. MS sux.. and in the mobile world is in it’s Death Throws… just those at MS haven’t realized it yet. As for Nokia… well too bad the green was the only thing they had seen in the business arrangement they entered with MS. It’ll be their downfall as well. Android has begun to dominate the European market as well as the Asian market too. Tisk tisk… I like the Nokia hardware, but not the software, it’s unfortunate cause I think the Nokia handsets would’ve been an interesting device with the Android OS on them. Oh well… Let me get back to my HTC Phone and read some more articles here. ;)
Im gonna let Microsoft know what I think of what they’re doing. I’m gonna wrote a letter!