La maison Android de Google est en feu. Pour rappel, Android est un système d’exploitation open-source pour smartphone développé par Google. Il est également aujourd’hui le système le plus largement déployé au niveau mondial, devant l’iPhone.
Ainsi, comme le mentionne Google dans une note parue le 8 aoà»t dernier sur son blog officiel, cette position dominante attire les foudres simultanées d’Apple, de Microsoft, d’Oracle, de Novell et de Nortel. La guerre des brevets est donc déclarée.
De manière générale, il ne reste donc qu’à espérer que l’innovation ne sera pas tuée par cette recherche éperdue de brevets pour couper la route à ses concurrents.
Retrouvez ci-dessous le lien vers cette prise de position et quelques liens liés à cette guerre des géants.
Android is on fire. More than 550,000 Android devices are activated every day, through a network of 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers. Android and other platforms are competing hard against each other, and that's yielding cool new devices and amazing mobile apps for consumers.
But Android's success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.
They're doing this by banding together to acquire Novell's old patents (the “CPTN†group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel's old patents (the “Rockstar†group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn't get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Phone 7; and even suing Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.
A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax†for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation.
This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they're really worth. The winning $4.5 billion for Nortel's patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion. Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop.
A lire également sur le même sujet :
- Guerre des brevets : Google défend son Android
- Guerre des brevets et Android : Google tape du poing sur la table
- Google et les brevets : drame en deux temps – RTL loisirs
