But [Scott] Widdowson is a specialist. He’s one of 10 reverse-engineers working full time for a stealthy company funded by some of the biggest names in technology: Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, and Ericsson. Called the Rockstar Consortium, the 32-person outfit has a single-minded mission: It examines successful products, like routers and smartphones, and it tries to find proof that these products infringe on a portfolio of over 4,000 technology patents once owned by one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies... In the last two months, Rockstar has started negotiations with as many as 100 potential licensees. And with control of a patent portfolio covering core wireless communications technologies such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 3G, there is literally no end in sight.

However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, which we informally call the “IPA”.</p><p>

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes.

A cover story in Men’s Journal, called “<a href="http://www.mensjournal.com/nathan-myhrvold">How a Geek Grills a Burger</a>,” casts the former Microsoft chief technology officer as a “mad scientist” living out a “nerd fantasy.”</p><p>
He has a bestselling six-volume cookbook, he studied astrophysics with Stephen Hawking, and his giant Tyrannasaurus rex skeleton has turned his waterfront home into a tourist attraction.</p><p>
And yes, by the way, he tried to convince Microsoft to make the iPhone, basically, more than two decades ago.

I wish the app developer community luck as far as Lodsys is concerned. I saw that some of the smaller defendants, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/gedeon/status/190541152125059073">including Iconfactory</a>, settled the dispute on undisclosed terms, presumably because they couldn't afford the cost and deal with risk of protracted litigation. I wish the remaining defendants as well as all those facing the threat of being sued that Apple's intervention will help to get his troll defeated. I also hope that <a href="http://www.fosspatents.com/2011/08/googles-reexamination-requests-against.html">Google's reexamination requests</a> will be successful. I still believe that those large players should do a whole lot more for app developers than what they are doing at this stage (for example, I believe they should give them blanket coverage against litigation costs)

Yahoo attacked Facebook with 10 patents, so Menlo Park has attacked Sunnyvale right back with 10 of its own. Get the popcorn; this is the biggest real-company-versus-patent-troll battle yet.

Yahoo's decision to sue Facebook for allegedly violating 10 of itspatents covering technologies like online advertising, privacy controls and messaging is widely linked to the determination of the company's new chief executive, Scott Thompson, to get a better return on its assets. Those assets include Yahoo's more than 1,000 U.S. patents, which reflect investments in research and development since the company was founded in 1994.

Some industry executives, however, view Yahoo's suit as a sign of weakness and a break with the Internet industry's tradition of avoiding patent suits.

The U.S. Circuit Judge overseeing the patent dispute between Apple and Motorola Mobility has ordered Motorola to provide Apple with details of Google's $12.5 billion acquisition as well as information about the development of Android.

In a filing on March 2, Apple requested to obtain the information stating that "the Android/Motorola acquisition discovery is highly relevant to Apple’s claims and defenses" in its ongoing patent suit against Motorola, which is also countersuing Apple.

From the perspective of patent law, the question is whether the improvements in question (putting multitouch on a phone, adding a graphical indicator to slide-to-unlock) would have been “obvious” to someone of ordinary skill in the art. But thisis just re-stating the same subjective question in slightly different terms. If you polled a bunch of engineers or patent lawyers, you’d likely get widely varying opinions.

And yet patent law imposes harsh penalties on subsequent innovators who stray outside these extremely fuzzy legal boundaries.

Motorola should honor its promises, and make its standard essential patents available on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. Microsoft is certainly prepared to pay a fair and reasonable price for use of others’ intellectual property. Within just the past few years, Microsoft has entered into more than a thousand patent licenses. We know how it’s done.

Unfortunately, Motorola has refused to make its patents available at anything remotely close to a reasonable price. For a $1,000 laptop, Motorola is demanding that Microsoft pay a royalty of $22.50 for its 50 patents on the video standard, called H.264. As it turns out, there are at least 2,300 other patents needed to implement this standard. They are available from a group of 29 companies that came together to offer their H.264 patents to the industry on FRAND terms. Microsoft’s patent royalty to this group on that $1,000 laptop?

Two cents.

But if Google is guilty of using Apple's ideas, Apple is equally guilty. Many researchers and companies invented technologies that predate the iPhone but made it possible. As Microsoft's Buxton points out, Wayne Westerman (the multitouch researcher who sold his startup and became an Apple employee in 2005) cited the work of numerous early multitouch researchers in his 1999 PhD thesis. The iPhone incorporated key innovations pioneered by Bob Boie, IBM, Jazzmutant, Jeff Han, and others.

Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch user interfaces—and combined them in a product greater than the sum of its parts. This pattern of combining and refining of previous innovations is the rule, not the exception, in innovative industries. Android is simply the latest example of the pattern.

Less than a week after <a href=http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/apple-brought-formal-eu-antitrust.html>Apple's EU antitrust complaint against Motorola Mobility</a> became publicly known, <a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2012/02/22/google-please-don-t-kill-video-on-the-web.aspx">Microsoft has also filed formal competition charges against MMI with the European Commission</a>.</p><p>With two industry leaders complaining about MMI's alleged abuse of FRAND-pledged, standard-essential patents, the prospects of formal investigations have certainly increased. Under its best practice guidelines, the European Commission will presumably make a determination on the launch of full-blown investigations within a few months. European regulators are <a href=http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/eu-launches-full-blown-investigation-of.html>already investigating Samsung's related conduct</a>, which is largely consistent with what MMI is doing in Europe.

The software patent system is totally askew. We need to look no further to see this than the recent news that Apple was granted a patent on sliding to unlock a mobile device. (Edit: It actually was granted back in February, but the case pinged again, and so we're all revisiting it.) It's bad enough that a governing body somewhere actually believes that you or I aren't smart enough to come to the natural conclusion on our own (that's basically what a patent means - it's a unique idea or process), but the fact that it existed on an old Windows CE device in 2005 was totally overlooked.

Theodore Essex, administrative law judge for the International Trade Commission, wrote in his Jan. 31 decision that Microsoft’s negotiations with Barnes & Noble over the use of Android in the Nook were “certainly hard bargaining,” but he concluded they didn’t qualify as patent misuse.
“Even assuming that these transactions and the related evidence establishes that Microsoft is bent on eliminating Android as a competitor, the mere fact that Microsoft is targeting Android for destruction is insufficient to establish an antitrust violation let alone patent misuse,” he wrote.

Last year, Facebook was named as a defendant in 22 lawsuits accusing it of patent infringement, double the number from 2010, according to a Reuters analysis of court documents on legal database Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters unit.

“In short, Pepper Hamilton is accusing its own client of infringement,” Mountain View, California-based Google said in the filing. “Pepper Hamilton should not be allowed to continue alleging infringement against the products and interests of its current client.”

Google, which has used Pepper Hamilton to help it apply for patents related to its Android mobile operating system, accused the law firm of disloyalty and said confidential information it shared creates conflicts of interest in the Digitude case. With so much patent litigation among technology companies there is bound to be some overlap among lawyers, said Scott Daniels, a partner with Westerman Hattori Daniels in Washington.

“Conflicts are hard on law firms,” Daniels said in an interview. “You don’t want to anger your clients.”

"Microsoft Corp. and LG Electronics have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for LG’s tablets, mobile phones and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome OS Platform. The contents of the agreement have not been disclosed."