Rockstar, patent-holding firm partially owned by Apple and Microsoft, sues Google and Android device makers

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John Gruber posted a very good piece on the on-going patent war.

This latest lawsuit filed by Rockstar is an escalation of a patent war against Google and Android, not the start of it. Nobody looks good here — not Apple, not Microsoft, but certainly not Google either. Google started filing lawsuits based on Motorola patents long before Rockstar filed this suit. Given that, I find it hard to believe that had Google won the bidding for the rights to Nortel’s patent trove — and it bid $4.4 billion for them — it wouldn’t have filed lawsuits based on them in the same way it has with Motorola’s.

Apple and Microsoft have been slammed for this, but few articles took Google’s Motorola into consideration.

But Motorola — a wholly-owned Google subsidiary — has filed patent lawsuits against Apple all over the world. Just one month ago Apple finally put an end to an 18-month injunction that prevented iCloud users in Germany from getting push notifications for email — because of a patent lawsuit filed by Google.

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