In what is just another battle in the ongoing "patent wars," a report recently released seems to indicate that the Federal Trade Commission is looking to open a suit against Google over licensing issues and patents currently held by Motorola. The issue mostly stems from FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) patents which (in a nut-shell) means that if some technology patent is submitted as a "standard," it must be able to be licensed to other OEMs for use in other products. This prevents something as widespread as LTE, for example, from being denied into mobile devices because the patent holder is unwilling to license the patent for anything less than exorbitant sums of cash.
As fate would have it, LTE is one of the issues that has been haggled over in this presumed suit. As most are aware, one of the features of the iPhone 5 is LTE connectivity, and there was another report recently that Apple was willing to pay Motorola (now owned by Google) $1 per iPhone for the license fee, and not a penny more. This presumably prompted Googs to seek an injunction ban against all devices that they felt violated this patent. And thus, the flame wars began...
Most of these suits are nonsense, and if it is true that any or all of the Motorola patents were applied for under the FRAND standard, then Google doesn't really have a leg to stand on for their injunction. How this will play out is anyone's guess...but if you're like me, you're pretty much over this whole "patent trolling" thing.
*Source: via BGR
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