Patent

Google tries to buy its way out of patent problems

$900 Million for Nortel's patents could put some of its patent questions to an end.

Google (GOOG) and its Android partners are, like the rest of the industry, engulfed in patent disputes from Oracle (ORCL), Nokia (NOK) Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and others over Android, and to lesser degree, Chrome.

As a younger company with only a relatively recent focus on mobile communications, Google has a shallow patent pool from which to MORE

Nokia won't take no for an answer

Told Apple had not violated 5 of its patents, Nokia filed a complaint about 7 more

The strange, prolonged patent dispute between Apple (AAPL) and Nokia (NOK) took another bizarre twist Tuesday.

Four days after an administrative law judge at the International Trade Commission in Washington made an initial determination that Apple was not -- as Nokia claimed -- in violation of five Nokia patents, the Finnish cellphone giant was back in MORE

Kodak, don't spend that $1BN just yet

Winning a skirmish at the ITC is not the same as winning a war. Apple vs. Nokia take note.

"Kodak Wins a Round in $1 Billion Apple, RIM Patent Dispute" -- Bloomberg News

Traders were pretty quick to cash in on that headline. Kodak's (EK) battered stock opened Friday at $3.30 a share and jumped nearly 25% to $4.12 in after-hours trading, as if those $1 billion were already in Kodak's pocket.

But MORE

Why U.S. patents are now less valuable

A stunning decision in a Microsoft patent infringement case may have made patent royalties more fair, but also made them much more unpredictable.

By Russell L. Parr and George Hovanec , guest contributors

A January decision by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had a sweeping effect:  it dropped the value of US patents. Just how much the value has been reduced, overall, is not yet known. Part of the MORE

Apple vs. Nokia: The legal battlelines

A simple patent dispute has escalated into a legal contest of Dickensian complexity

In Oct. 2009, when Nokia (NOK) first complained in a U.S. federal court that Apple (AAPL) had infringed on 10 of its telecommunications patents, the case could be summarized in a fairly simple chart like the one at right created by FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller.

Fourteen months later, that relatively straightforward patent dispute has escalated through suits and countersuits MORE

J.P. Morgan: 4G patent war looms

Nokia, Motorola and RIM unlikely to let Nortel's intellectual property go without a fight

In a note to clients issued Tuesday, J.P. Morgan's data networking team smelled danger in Monday's report that Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) have bid on part of the patent portfolio being auctioned off in the wake of Nortel Networks' January 2009 bankruptcy.

There are more than 4,000 patents at stake, organized into six "buckets" by related technologies, MORE

Apple focuses on the camera

Ten patents published last week show how hard it's working on fixing your snapshots

Apple (AAPL) files a ton of patents, and you never know when one is published whether the technology covered will ever see the light of day. But the filings do tell you a lot about where the company is focusing its R&D efforts.

That's what makes the flurry of imaging-related patents published last week -- and summarized in MORE

Apple vs. Android: The patent battlemap

A high-tech patent expert has reduced the legal disputes to a 13-part timeline

With the exception of the patent attorneys at each of the litigant's firms, there may be nobody who has followed the legal battles surrounding Apple's (AAPL) iOS and Google's (GOOG) Android better than Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents.

On Friday, Mueller published a long post summarizing the 42 patents-in-suit between Apple and Motorola (MOT) in several venues, from the MORE

Google awarded patent for Google Instant/ Social Search

The USPTO today awarded Google a patent for what looks like Google Instant Search.

Google has been thinking about Instant for a while it seems.  United States Patent 7836044 covers Anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine and was filed in June of 2004.  It is described as:

A search system monitors the input of a search query by a user. Before the user finishes entering the search query, the MORE

iPhone vs. the world: Four Apple patents shot down by staff, 24 to go

Reports of a big win for Nokia in its patent fight with Apple may be premature.

Florian Mueller, who has forgotten more about high-tech patents than most of us will ever know, says we should take with a grain of salt what Bloomberg, Reuters and the IDG News Service are reporting about Apple vs. Nokia, the patent trial that opened Monday before the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington.

The ITC staff MORE