The patent system is broken: Google

As the force behind Android — a mobile operating system that now claims 43 per cent of the smartphone OS market — Google is at the centre of the mobile patents battle.

This means that it has a target on its back; companies such as Oracle, Apple and Microsoft claim that the free operating system infringes on their patents. Oracle has sued Google, while Microsoft and Apple have sued and threatened litigation against companies that market Android-based products. Apple has successfully kept the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 off retailer shelves, while Microsoft has signed half the world's original design manufacturers to patent protection deals.

David Drummond, Google's top legal officer, reacted in April by posting a scathing indictment of adversaries Apple, Microsoft and Oracle for pursuing "bogus" patent claims that may serve to drive up the costs of phones using Android.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Google patent counsel Tim Porter argued that the patent system is broken, and that the legal posturing is only wasting time and resources.

When asked about Microsoft's patent protection deals, Porter said that this was a common revenue strategy for the software giant.

"This is a tactic that Microsoft has used in the past, with Linux, for example," Porter said. "When their products stop succeeding in the marketplace, when they get marginalised, as is happening now with Android, they use the large patent portfolio they've built up to get revenue from the success of other companies' products."

While not addressing the question of whether software should be patentable, he called the current system "broken", and said that for many years, patents were written in a vague and overly broad way. "They're being used to hinder innovation or skim revenue off the top of a successful product," he said.

Porter went on to say that it stands behind its partners, and defended Google's recent attempts to buy patent portfolios from companies, such as Nortel, in an effort "to increase our ability to protect ourselves when people assert patents against us or our partners."

Via CNET