Google And Microsoft Call A Truce, End Patent Lawsuits Over Motorola Mobility

Microsoft and Google have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany.

Not all patent battles between the two involve mobile technology, a few cover WiFi, Xbox, and other Windows products. The company was subsequently sold on to Lenovo previous year minus its patents which the search giant kept to itself. Microsoft said Motorola had failed in its obligation to fairly license its patents over video compression and wireless technology.

While the deal ends this round of lawsuits, it is no guarantee Microsoft and Google would not clash in the future, a Microsoft spokeswoman told Reuters.

Microsoft’s and Google’s pledge to “collaborate on certain patent matters” is the latest sign that many large tech companies are recognizing the need to work past the unique problems they can encounter due to the quirks of USA patent law. On the other hand, Motorola was asking for about $4 billion in royalties for the Xbox because of a few patents used.

Will Microsoft continue on its path to more of an open source/open standards company?

The case between the two companies kicked off in 2010, when pugnacious Steve Ballmer was still CEO of Microsoft, with the software giant accusing Google of incorporating its intellectual property into the Android mobile operating system.

However, the financial terms of the deal were however not disclosed and there has been no clarity on “who paid whom” and “how much”.

In effect, this peace treaty between the two companies is their efforts to join forces against what is seen as one of the tech industry’s biggest scourges of recent years, that being, patent trolls. Microsoft has claimed that it was collecting royalties from 50 percent of all Android makers in 2011. At least in Europe, the companies will be more civil and understanding of each other as compared in the U.S. where patent lawsuits are prevalent.

Whatever disputes arch-rivals Google and Microsoft have, today they’ve agreed that patent litigation isn’t the right way to settle them.

Google and Microsoft have abruptly ended their long-running patent war. Among the lawsuits Microsoft filed that year was one against Motorola, then a stand-alone company.