Google asks US court to rule that Android has not infringed Rockstar patents

Google has asked a court in California to rule that it does not directly or indirectly infringe seven patents of Rockstar Consortium, after the Microsoft, Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson and Sony backed patent firm sued seven of Google’s Android partners in a court in Texas.
The lawsuits filed in October in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, have placed a cloud on the Android platform, threatened Google’s business and relationships with its customers and partners and its sales of Nexus-branded Android devices, and created a justiciable controversy between Google and Rockstar, Google wrote in a complaint this week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Rockstar acquired Nortel Networks’ patents for US$4.5 billion after outbidding Google in 2011. It filed lawsuits in October against Samsung Electronics, HTC and five other companies alleging infringement of some or all of seven patents.
Samsung’s Mobile Hotspot feature, which allows sharing of a mobile device’s data connection with other devices by turning it into a wireless access point, is alleged to infringe claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,128,298 (“the ‘298 patent”) entitled “Internet Protocol Filter,” for example.
Describing the lawsuits by Rockstar as “Android OEM actions,” Google said in its filing that Rockstar has asserted its patents only against “certain mobile communication devices having a version (or an adaption thereof) of [the] Android operating system.” Each of the “Android OEM Defendants” also makes other products that do not use Google’s Android platform, Google added. Rockstar has also alleged patent infringement by Nexus 7, a device offered for sale by Google and built by Asus, one of the “Android OEM Defendants,” according to the filing.
Google claims that its Android platform and the Nexus 5, 7 and 10 devices it sells directly or indirectly do not infringe any claim of the seven patents in the suit. It has asked the court for a declaration that both Android and the Nexus devices do not infringe Rockstar’s patents.
The Internet company has described Rockstar as a firm that “produces no products and practices no patents” in its filing. “Instead, Rockstar employs a staff of engineers in Ontario, Canada, who examine other companies’ successful products to find anything that Rockstar might use to demand and extract licenses to its patents under threat of litigation.”
Google said the California court had jurisdiction as, among other reasons, Rockstar’s shareholders like Apple in Cupertino, California, “direct and participate in Rockstar’s licensing and enforcement efforts against companies in California.”
In a separate action, Rockstar and subsidiary NetStar Technologies have alleged that Google has infringed seven other patents acquired from Nortel. The patents, all titled “Associative Search Engine,” relate to an invention used to provide advertisements based on users’ search terms. Google has asked for a 30-day extension of time to file its response to the complaint, which was granted by the court in Texas. Advertisements around search terms is a key component of Google’s business.

src : http://www.pcworld.com/article/2083040/google-asks-us-court-to-rule-that-android-has-not-infringed-rockstar-patents.html

Zuckerberg: Google Can't Stop Facebook Home on Android

At Facebook‘s mobile strategy event yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was surprisingly confident of Google‘s inability and unwillingness to prevent Facebook from rolling out Home on Android, because of the search engine commitment to opennness.
But when Google realizes Facebook Home is hijacking Android, drawing users to the social network’s services and ads, away from Google’s, things might turn ugly.
Below are Zuckerberg’s comments on the matter:

Zuckerberg on the relationship with Google
Google is aware of what we are doing and we talked to them about this and all of that. But fundamentally Android is just a more open system, so we don’t have to work directly with them in order to build an experience like this. So we can even go deeper that we’re talking about today. They’ve designed Android from the ground up to support deep integration.

Can Google stop Facebook Home?
We think that Google takes its commitment to openness in this ecosystem really seriously. These features that we are plugging into aren’t like a surface feature of Android that you can easily paper over… they’re operating system really is designed from the ground up to support these things. And it is theoretically possible that they go back on there commitment to openness but I don’t think that they will and it will take a lot of effort, a lot of really concerted effort to change the rules of something like this and make the system different. So it won’t just be some subtle thing that they choose to do. It will have to be a complete 180˚ in their philosophy and promise of openness to the community if they go back.
 
But what if they decide to do it?
If 20% of the time that people are spending on their phones are in [Facebook] Home or in other Facebook experiences then I really think that they’re going to have a hard time making a rational decision to do that and looking at themselves in the face and saying that they are building the best experience that they can… Every company that I know wakes up in the morning trying to build the best experience. And Google too!
(src http://www.forbes.com)