Android Devices Are on the Wrong Side of Microsoft’s Patent Rights

The Android platform and by extension all Android devices are on the wrong side of Microsoft’s intellectual property rights, revealed Horacio Gutierrez, the company’s Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property & Licensing.

In the past few years, the software giant poured over $9 billion per year into research and development efforts, and the innovation built within Microsoft Research is reflected into one of the world’s top patent portfolios.

Gutierrez underlines that Android infringes a number of Microsoft’s patents, and that this situation has direct, legal repercussions on all companies involved in manufacturing and offering consumers Android devices.

Illustrative examples are Barnes & Noble, Inc. and its device manufacturers, Foxconn International Holdings Ltd. and Inventec Corporation which have just been sued by the Redmond company in the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington.

Just as illustrative examples are Motorola, also currently waging legal battle with Microsoft on several fronts, as well as HTC and Amazon.com which already agreed to pay the software giant, licensing the right to use technology covered by Microsoft’s patents.

According to Gutierrez, current suits against companies using Android for smartphones, tablets and additional form factors cover no less than 25 patents. And other may very well follow.

“Microsoft is not a company that pursues litigation lightly. In fact, this is only our seventh proactive patent infringement suit in our 36-year history. But we simply cannot ignore infringement of this scope and scale,” Gutierrez stated.

Microsoft’s IP boss wanted to make it very clear that the software giant opts to license its patents than file lawsuits. It was the case with Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec, which failed to see eye to eye with Microsoft after what Gutierrez said was more than a year’s worth of negotiations.

Technology included in the Nook and Nook Color tablets infringes on Microsoft’s IP related to user experience features, with Gutierrez offering some examples, including innovation:

“• Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

• Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

• Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;

• Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

• Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.”