Google's Android Generates $31B Revenue, Oracle Says

OP was referring to license fees, which google does not charge. Mandatory certification by a third party is different from that, and judging by the numbers in that article amount to less than a dollar per device (probably far less for flagship devices that sell millions of units?).

> You may be right that most OEMs don't agree to it. But the larger ones that are on the western markets definitely do.

No OEM agreed to licensing fees, they don't exist (as far as is publicly known).

"We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."

Source: http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/my_attitude_on_oracle...

But believe on whatever Google sells.

A better analogy might be television. If a company such as GE produced TVs and also owned a television network (NBC), then selling TVs so people could watch NBC would generate ad revenue but if someone replaces their GE television with a Sony TV, NBC still makes money selling advertisements.

I'm not sure I would describe the television equipment business as the entity generating revenue.

In the Google ad world, it is the ad-network that is generating the revenue, not the phones/tablets/computers that are rendering the ads.

That isn't to say that Google isn't getting revenue from Android, just that it would be odd to attribute the ad-revenue to the device business.

without ads, magazine will be just fine. people still pay for that.

1. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/02/new-android-oem-licen...

  Please elaborate. How's google's Android business a A) monopoly B) illegal?

I would also love to see hardware manufactures use their own platform because it would make them realize how incompetent they are at writing software and creating ecosystems. It would also eliminate them from the market as no one would buy a phone with such poor quality software and the lack of app availability.

As for OEM's having to bear the cost of deploying software updates, well, if these OEM's weren't so insistent of rolling their own Android OS, complete with their nasty UI changes, (in an effort to trick their customers that they actually created the OS from scratch) and simply shipped Google's version then the cost of deploying the updates would be much less. Additionally, I don't get why you think Google is on the hook for an OEM's OS. They created the OS by customizing it so they're responsible for it. But, let's face reality, these OEM's would prefer shipping a brand new phone rather than issuing updates because it's in their nature to make as much money off of their hardware and OS updates just prolong their support and detract from future sales.

But "copyright protection can extend to APIs" is all that the courts' decisions amount to so far. As the article says, the case has been remanded back to the district court, which will be trying to answer the question, "Given that APIs are not inherently unprotected, are Google's actions in this case punishable, or did they amount to fair use?"

Here's how that's gonna go:

Allsup is almost definitely going to find it fair use, and (with a little less certainty) the Federal Circuit is going to reverse that decision when Oracle appeals it. At that point, we're back to waiting to see if the Supreme Court will hear Google's arguments, but this time their argument will be that, APIs being unprotected or not, their actions were essentially no different than the ones the Supreme Court determined were defensible in Lexmark v. Static Control in pursuit of interoperability. First Amendment probably won't actually factor in to this.

This is assuming that neither Oracle nor Google capitulates before it makes it that far. Oracle probably won't. Google might.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reve...