BARNES AND NOBLE ASKS US GOVERNMENT TO INVESTIGATE MICROSOFT FOR MOBILE DOMINATION

Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) asked U.S. regulators to investigate whether Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) seeks to monopolize the mobile-device market by demanding patent royalties on electronics running on Google Inc.’s Android operating system. “Microsoft is embarking on a campaign of asserting trivial and outmoded patents against manufacturers of Android devices,” Barnes & Noble said in an Oct. 17 letter to Gene Kimmelman, the Justice Department’s chief counsel for competition policy. “Microsoft is attempting to raise its rivals’ costs in order to drive out competition and to deter innovation in mobile devices.”

The world’s largest software maker accused New York-based Barnes & Noble of infringing five patents and filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, seeking to block imports of the Nook readers. Barnes & Noble made public four letters and a presentation to the Justice Department in a filing with the commission yesterday.
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, contends it owns patented inventions that are used in the Android operating system, and has struck licensing deals with companies including Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. (2498), two of the biggest makers of Android phones.

“All modern operating systems include many patented technologies,” Microsoft said in a statement. “Microsoft has taken licenses to patents for Windows and we make our patents available on reasonable terms for other operating systems, like Android. We would be pleased to extend a license to Barnes & Noble.”

SAMSUNG AND MICROSOFT SIGN HUGE PATENT DEAL

Microsoft is announcing today the biggest Android-related patent deal to date, signing a broad cross-licensing agreement with Samsung.
With the deal, Microsoft will get royalty revenue on every Android smartphone and tablet that Samsung sells. Redmond already has a deal with another major handset maker — HTC — that sells both Android and Windows Phone devices.

“Together with the license agreement signed last year with HTC, today’s agreement with Samsung means that the top two Android handset manufacturers in the United States have now acquired licenses to Microsoft’s patent portfolio,” Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and top IP lawyer Horacio Gutierrez said in a blog post. “These two companies together accounted for more than half of all Android phones sold in the U.S. over the past year.”

Microsoft currently earns more money of licensing to Android handset manufacturers than it does from its own Windows Phone OS.

GOOGLE BUYS OVER 1,000 IBM PATENTS TO HELP AGAINST ANDROID LAWSUITS

Google Inc. bought 1,023 patents from IBM as the Internet search and advertising company bolsters its strategy of defending against smartphone lawsuits. Google is building an arsenal of patents that the company has said is largely designed to counter a “hostile, organized campaign” by companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. against the Android operating system for mobile devices. Google had already acquired 1,030 patents from IBM in a transaction recorded in July, and will obtain more than 17,000 with its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.

Jim Prosser, a spokesman for the Mountain View, California- based company, confirmed the transaction today without providing details or financial terms. Chris Andrews, a spokesman for Armonk, New York-based IBM, declined to comment.

HTC COUNTER SUES APPLE WITH FORMER GOOGLE PATENTS

There's a fresh new twist in the never ending Apple / HTC patent battle. The Taiwanese handset manufacturer is hitting back against Apple using newly obtained firepower: nine patents picked up from Google last week. The patents, which began life under Palm, Motorola and Openwave Systems, were transferred to HTC on September 1st.

Apple has sued HTC for patent infringement as well over HTC's use of Android.

APPLE & MICROSOFT TRYING TO STRANGLE ANDROID WITH PATENTS SAYS GOOGLE

Apple and Microsoft are playing dirty, according to a new blog post by Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond. Instead of attempting to build innovative products and features, Drummond says Apple and Microsoft are content with filing repeated patent complaints in an attempt to impede Android’s rapid growth. Apple, Microsoft and others are carrying out “a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents,” Drummond wrote in his post. “They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the ‘Rockstar’ group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Mobile; and even suingBarnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.” Drummond goes on to write that Google intends to support its partners who are being targeted by these patent complaints. ”In this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it,” Drummond stated.

HTC ACQUIRES S3 GRAPHICS AND ITS PATENT PORTFOLIO

HTC announced today it'll purchase S3 Graphics and its patent portfolio from VIA for a cool $300 million, giving the smartphone maker 265 new weapons in its IP arsenal. Also part of the deal is a perpetual license to the patents' former owner, so that the chipset manufacturer can keep cranking out silicon without fear of legal reprisal.

GOOGLE BID 'pi' FOR NORTEL PATENTS

At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.

Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.

"Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers," one of the sources said.

"It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi," the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.

"Either they were supremely confident or they were bored."

It was not clear what strategy Google was employing, whether it wanted to confuse rival bidders, intimidate them, or simply express the irreverence that is part and parcel of its corporate persona. Whatever its reasons, Google's shenanigans did not work.

A group of six companies -- Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony -- won the auction of 6,000 Nortel patents and patent applications with a $4.5 billion bid.

NORTEL PATENTS WON BY GROUP INCLUDING APPLE, MICROSOFT AND RIM

A group of companies including Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, EMC and Ericsson offered the winning bid in an auction that will net them Nortel’s extensive portfolio of patents. The bankrupt telecommunications company held roughly 6,000 patents, and the six-company consortium’s winning bid came in at $4.5 billion. Among the big losers were Google, which opened the bidding at $900 million, and Intel. Patents within the massive cache cover a wide range of technologies including wireless, voice, networking, optical data transmission and 4G LTE. RIM said it would be responsible for $770 million of the winning bid, and Ericsson separately stated it would pay $340 million. The rest of the companies in the consortium did not disclose their contributions.

DOJ CLEARS GOOGLE'S BID FOR NORTEL PATENTS

U.S. antitrust enforcers have given Google Inc. the go-ahead to pursue its $900 million opening bid for a trove of high-tech patents being sold next week by Canadian telecommunications-equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp., people familiar with the matter said.
After an antitrust review, the Justice Department concluded that Google's potential ownership of the patents wouldn't raise any major competitive concerns, these people said. The clearance could give Google a leg-up against rivals in its bid for the patents, part of its effort to acquire an arsenal of patents that could help it ward off lawsuits by competitors.

APPLE DEFENDS DEVELOPERS AGAINST LODSYS

Earlier this month a company called Lodsys began sending letters to iOS app developers using Apple’s in-app billing system, asking each to license its technology separately. In a blog post on May 15th, Lodsys explained on its website that “the scope of [Apple's] current licenses does NOT enable [Apple] to provide ’pixie dust’ to bless another (third party) business applications.”

On Monday Apple issued a response to Lodsys explaining that iOS developers are safe under its licensing program. “Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license,” Bruce Sewell, Apple’s senior vice president and general counsel, said. “The technology that is targeted in your notice letters is technology that Apple is expressly licensed under the Lodsys patents to offer to Apple’s App Makers.”

It sounds like developers that have received the notification letters can breathe easy knowing that Apple appears to be offering some support.

RIM GETS ACCESS TO INTELLECTUAL VENTURES VAST CATALOG OF PATENTS

Research In Motion has reached an agreement with Intellectual Ventures that will provide the Canadian BlackBerry manufacturer with access to the company’s library of over 30,000 patents. With other technology giants engaged in a seemingly endless loop of lawsuits , RIM is hoping to provide itself legal cover for future smartphone innovations by purchasing the rights to this war chest of intellectual property.

“Intellectual Ventures offers an efficient way to access the invention rights companies need to stay competitive within the market,” said Mario Obeidat, Intellectual Ventures’ head of telecom licensing. The patent holding company was founded by former Microsoft CTO, Nathan Myhrvoid, in 2000, and boasts both Samsung and HTC as its other high-profile, mobile clients. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.