Wednesday, April 23, 2014 5:56:33 PM
As part of the firms' Android agreement, search giant agreed to cover some legal costs and potential damages
By CAROLINE GABRIEL
Published: 23 April, 2014
As the court battle between Samsung and Apple continues to grumble along in Silicon Valley, it has emerged that Google has been shouldering some of Samsung's costs in the most critical of all the handset IPR face-offs for the strength of Android.
As the world's largest smartphone maker, Samsung scarcely seems to need Google's handouts, but the alliance shows how the search giant, while avoiding direct confrontations (except those inherited with Motorola Mobility), has been working behind the scenes to fend off Apple's attacks on its platform.
According to CNET, a Google patent attorney, James Maccoun, authenticated leaked emails, exchanged by Samsung and Google in 2012. They stated that the search firm would "defend and indemnify" the Korean giant in its US patent fight with Apple, taking on some of the costs of the defense, as well as a share of the damages in the case of a court loss.
Google's support stems from its controversial 'Mobile Application Distribution Agreement'. This is signed by Android OEMs if they want to use key Google services such as Search, Maps, YouTube and the Play store. In return they may be required to make Google the default search engine, to preinstall certain apps, and to place them in a particular place. However, it seems that Samsung's agreement - and perhaps those of other OEMs - also included a commitment from Google to help with potential legal costs related to certain Android technologies.
In the current case, that could apply to two of the five patents at issue. In the first Silicon Valley case between the two handset giants, Apple was awarded $930m in damages but failed to gain a product ban. Now it is seeking a further $2.2bn in damages from round two, while Samsung is asking for $6.2m. The latter sum has been reduced, perhaps to "portray Apple as greedy, given the remarkably high per-phone price [$40] Apple is seeking", as Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley told Bloomberg.
Having once spurned patents as unnecessary to the open software model it claims to favour, Google has recently made up for lost time, and built its defences against Apple and Microsoft, with purchases like that of Motorola Mobility. And according to a study by US analyst Chetan Sharma, Google was in the top 10 firms in terms of mobile patents granted last year in the US or Europe.
Samsung was in the lead, followed by IBM, Qualcomm, BlackBerry, LG, Sony, Microsoft, Google and AT&T, in that order. Among cellcos, AT&T led the league table, followed by NTT Docomo, Sprint, Verizon, Telecom Italia, Swisscom, T-Mobile, Orange, SK Telecom and TeliaSonera. Samsung also surged ahead in wireless infrastructure IPR filings, followed by Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Qualcomm, LG, Intel, Siemens, Fujitsu, NEC and Panasonic.
http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2014/04/23/google-bankrolling-samsungs-patent-war-apple.htm
"Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them." - Albert Einstein
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