There's no question that Android has seen some crazy growth as of late, but something else the platform's been seeing a lot of recently are patent disputes. We've seen Microsoft sue the likes of Barnes and Noble, HTC, and Motorola, and Apple's gone after several of the same companies as Microsoft. Today Google finally put together a blog post on the matter penned by David Drummond, Google's Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer. In the article, Drummond calls out Google's competitors for leading what he believes to be "a hostile, organized campaign against Android" that's "waged through bogus patents."
Explaining his reasoning behind this belief, Drummond says that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle are out to make it difficult for other manufacturers to release Android devices by imposing a "tax" for using patents purchased from old companies like Novell and Nortel. These patents, Drummond believes, are bought by groups of Google's competitors that team up in order to prevent Google from getting a piece of the patent pie.
Drummond wraps up his post by saying that Google isn't sitting idly by and letting its manufacturers get smacked around by Apple and Microsoft. In order to help the likes of HTC and Motorola, Drummond says that Google's been lobbying the Department of Justice to force the group that bought the Novell patents to license them on fair terms and has also been investigating whether or not Microsoft and Apple acquired the Nortel patents as an anti-competitive measure. Finally, Google has been working to build up its own patent collection in order to "reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android."
This post from Google's Chief Legal Officer is definitely full of some strongly-worded claims, and although you're likely to get a different answer to the question of whether or not Drummond is right depending on who you ask, the article does make you think. What do you all make of Drummond's argument? Do you believe that Microsoft and Apple are indeed out to get Android?
