Microsoft joins the beating of androids using broad patents

Seems Microsoft is not just playing good cop vs bad cop with its thick patent stick. This Friday 1/10 it sued Motorola for patent infringements on Android phones. “Motorola needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its Android smartphones,” says Microsoft IPR cheif, Horacio Gutierrez, in a statement.

In other news: 'Microsoft indemnifies its Windows Phone 7 licensees against patent infringement claims,' the company said. 'We stand behind our product, and step up to our responsibility to clear the necessary IP rights.'"

Its was just not that obvious that the protection deal was there to be safe from Microsoft to start with.

This seems to be the other end of the lobbying activities that Microsoft use to change "open standards" into standard-you-pay-for. Microsoft is calling for tax on innovation on a wide scale, effectively transforming open into gated.

Looking at the patents in this case, it seems many of the patents relate to FAT, open standards and also OS-functions in Linux. This suit also has further implications in the ongoing battle on what patents that should be valid - and offers a great test-case. I'll get back on the patents in this case. 

This is the patent-list from ars technica

• 5,579,517: Common name space for long and short filenames
• 5,758,352: Common name space for long and short filenames
• 6,621,746: Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations
• 6,826,762: Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer
• 6,909,910: Method and system for managing changes to a contact database
• 7,644,376: Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes
• 5,664,133: Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior
• 6,578,054: Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information
• 6,370,566: Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device

/jonas