It seems that just about anyone can sue for anything these days. “Oh that’s a cool feature of that toaster. 8 pieces of bread at ONCE? No way…. TOO BAD I THOUGHT OF IT FIRST!! You’ll be hearing from our lawyer.” Ok now maybe not that ridiculous. But it sure feels that way. The newest batch of news related to patents and infringing upon said ownership rights comes from Fujifilm. You know that photography behemoth company that makes cameras? You can find their little disposables in just about any shop that… well, sells anything. There are claiming that Motorola, which was recently acquired by Google, has used Android to infringe on four different patent packages that they hold the rights to.
Just to see if the claims against Android and Motorola are legit, FOSS patents Florian Mueller was hired to examine them. His honest opinion is that the patents are worded with an extremely broad and vague explanation of what they preside over. It sounds to me like what he meant to say is that the patents are for lack of a better description, total BS. To illustrate this point of mine let me explain one of the patents. Fujifilm, (The camera giant) holds ownership to the idea of a telephone that has the ability to communicate with other technological devices, over a path other than a telephone network. So… just so we can all wrap our minds around this, it basically means just about any smartphone out there… ever made, is infringing upon Fujifilm’s patent. So I suppose we should reel in the executives from Apple, HTC, Sony, Samsung, etc. and throw them onto the fire as well. Cause almost every damn smartphone on the planet can communicate with other devices on a path other than a telecommunications network. I can count the ways, via Bluetooth, wifi, NFC, even IR years ago. So the question begs, why now and why Motorola for the target of this particular supposed patent infringement?
What’s even more astounding than the patent claims that are being thrown in Google and Androids direction is the amount of money that has been gathered from these court cases. Between the 7 companies that have set out to sue Google over Android infringing on patents, (which include Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Gemalto, British Telecom, Nokia, and Fujifilm as the latest) the market value of all these claims has reached in excess of a trillion dollars according to Mueller.
It really is amazing at the amount of these types of cases that are in the public eye as often and as recent as they have been. If these patent lawsuits were A-list parties, it should come as no surprise that Apple is almost always attending. Did anyone really expect it to be any different? Does anyone else think that this patent is just about as crazy as it gets?