Apple and Google's Motorola unit agree to settle smartphone patent litigation | Hacker News Reader

Apple and Google's Motorola unit agree to settle smartphone patent litigation

reuters.com

67 pointsjbraithwaite16 comments

According to the article this settlement is limited to the Motorola unit that is being sold to Lenovo and does not include any cross patent license. The title makes it seem like Job's "Thermonuclear War" was finally at an end, and that doesn't seem to be the case at all. The title ought to qualify it with "Google's Motorola" or something.

The article doesn't actually say that, it differentiates between the handset business that was sold and the remainder Motorola Mobility unit which holds the patents:

"Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2012 for $12.5 billion, and this year announced was selling Motorola Mobility's handset business to Lenovo, while keeping the vast majority of the patents."

Thanks for pointing that out. We changed the title.

I'm sorry if I missed it... What does that mean though? Does it mean that Lenovo will be acquiring a litigation free company, or just that Apple wants a time-out with Google, and the game will continue once Lenovo is holding the ball?

It simply means that Google and Apple has agreed to stop all current lawsuits against each other (Google still owns the patents that Apple filed lawsuits on) at the moment.

These lawsuits can restart any time.

Apple and Google promises to work together on certain patent reform areas. IMO, that's most likely related to IP trolls, those two companies are in the top three list of companies constantly getting sued by IP trolls.

Lenovo is not involved here.

I was wishing that Tim Cook would actually do it. I wonder why not?

Where's the actual joint statement from the companies?

If you thinking this is a "kumbaya" moment, think again. They've merely determined that the best they can do is litigate each other into a stalemate, or that they don't have a enough of a competitive overlap to warrant a war. This might be more of an "oligopoly" moment.

You have to wonder though: what would Steve Jobs have done?

> If you thinking this is a "kumbaya" moment, think again. They've merely determined that the best they can do is litigate each other into a stalemate, or that they don't have a enough of a competitive overlap to warrant a war. This might be more of an "oligopoly" moment.

I don't think anyone thinks that mutually assured destruction as applied to patent lawsuits are based on a desire for world peace or anything like that. Patent stalemates always work this way because it's (unfortunately) the best way to work around the broken system[1]. Jobs was just a lunatic and this is a reversion to a more normal state of affairs for non-patent-troll companies.

[1]other than sticking to a pledge to not use patents offensively, but that's something of a prisoner's dilemma that a lot of companies understandably can't resist, Apple included.

In other news a few dozen attorneys cancelled their yacht orders.

Deleted comment

I'm glad they're at each other's throats. It's driving cell phone development at an insane rate.

It's competition that is driving cell phone development, not a profusion of many thousands of government-granted monopolies over aspects of each phone.

Of course. But it would be even worse if they had the patents and weren't at each other's throats.

I just wish everyone would concentrate on OpenStreetMap. Self-driving cars are going to need open data.

This would be really great for consumers but then we wouldn't have as much competition driving it all forward.

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