Google is getting more involved in the patents war and things will only get uglier

Sep 8, 2011 07:30 GMT  ·  By

In the escalating patents war, Google has been staying mostly quiet so far. It did start gobbling up patents wherever it could and complained about the unfairness of it all, but it's been mostly on the defensive, in fact, mostly on the sideline.

With HTC's latest lawsuit against Apple, Google is finally making some offensive moves, though it's still not involved in the fight directly.

Google transferred, or sold, several patents to HTC which the Taiwanese phone maker then used to sue Apple in the US.

It also used some of those patents to prop up an existing complaint with the International Trade Commission.

It's the boldest move from Google so far and it's the closest the company got to being involved directly in a patent suit over Android.

The most interesting part is that the four of the nine patents that HTC got from Google actually came from Motorola, which Google moved to acquire last month.

Even more interesting though is that the patents were all acquired months before the Motorola deal was announced or even in the works.

Google bought the four patents from Motorola, one in October last year, two in February and the last in March. The other patents initially came from Palm, two of them, and Openwave System, the remaining three.

Several phone makers using Android are being threatened or have already been sued by Apple or Microsoft. But no one has gone against Google.

Oracle has sued Google over patent and copyright infringement, but this is over the Java technology used by Android and not over anything related to mobile technology.

And Google has stayed out of the fight so far, partially because it wasn't targeted directly, partially because it couldn't really do much, since it had few patents of its own.

Meanwhile, its Android partners were getting hammered, raising fears over the operating system's long-term viability and cost. And, while companies like Samsung have a long history and plenty of patents to defend themselves, HTC is a relatively new company with very few patents, much like Google.

It's perhaps this very reason that determined Google to help it, since, despite HTC claiming that it bought the patents from Google, the move was clearly meant to help HTC fight Apple.

Google is about to get its hands on 17,000 patents from Motorola. But the deal hasn't been approved, so Google likely doesn't own any of those patents yet, hence the reason it used patents it had obtained earlier.

At this point though, with Google engaging in the fight, albeit in a roundabout way, it may only be a matter of time before Apple goes directly against the search giant.

Or, though it's something it said it wouldn't do, Google could go against Apple or Microsoft itself and file a lawsuit. One thing is for sure, the patents war in the mobile space is only just beginning and the fight is only going to get tougher and messier.