So far, several companies have reached patent agreements with Microsoft on Android devices, the largest of which is naturally HTC. According to the agreement reached between the two parties last year, HTC needs to pay Microsoft a patent fee of $5 for every Android device sold. Not long ago, Microsoft reached similar agreements with four companies including Flextronics.
In addition to those companies that have reached a licensing agreement, Microsoft also requires Samsung to pay a licensing fee of 15 US dollars for each Android phone, and also requires Motorola and B&; N filed a lawsuit, still struggling. According to this trend, it is very likely that major Android device manufacturers will eventually reach a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft at different prices. That is to say, in the near future, every time we buy an Android phone, we will contribute a few dollars to Microsoft.
For the agreement that has been reached, Microsoft has not announced the specific contents of the relevant patents, probably to save one hand for future surprise attacks. But fortunately, there are Motorola and B&; N such rebellion forced Microsoft to submit some specific patent contents to the court. The following parts involve some common sense functions commonly used in smartphone operating systems and even desktop operating systems, which makes people feel ironic.
In the evidence file, Microsoft also listed in detail the patent infringement of Motorola's Droid 2 smartphone. Microsoft claims that the phone's flash memory, calendar and other special features infringe on Microsoft's intellectual property rights. Microsoft also explained these patents in detail in its complaint against Motorola in the US District Court in Seattle.
Patents mentioned in the lawsuit
The patent number is 5,579,565,438+07, which is supported by long file names. Before version 5, MS-DOS only supported file names (including extensions) with 1 1 characters, so Microsoft invented a method to support both long and short file names. Friends who have used the DOS operating system should know that the file name DOS exceeding 1 1 characters will be automatically shortened, and some will be replaced by ~ symbols. This patent is about this realization. What is puzzling is, does Android use this patent?
Patent No.6,621746, flash memory erasure. Monitor the use of flash memory, and carry out targeted erasing operation when appropriate. This involves the management of flash file system, and the specific description is complicated, so it is impossible to judge whether it is related to Android.
Patent No.6,909,965,438+00, contact creation and update. In particular to a system and a method for updating contacts or creating new contacts according to call records. This is estimated that many smartphones can't escape.
Patent No.7,644,376, System Status Monitoring and Notification System. It is mainly about an API that allows mobile applications to obtain changes in mobile phone status and manage global system status notifications.
Patent No.6,578,054, incremental synchronization. A system and method for synchronizing multiple data copies in a server and a client, by which incremental changes of one data copy will be identified, transmitted and integrated into all other data copies. According to this patent description, the data synchronization function of Android can be said to be completely annihilated.
In U.S. Pat. No.6,370,566, a request to plan a meeting is initiated from a mobile device. The implementation described in the patent is not the same as Google Calendar, so I don't quite understand where this conflicts with Android.
Microsoft's Linux system patent
More ironically, Microsoft began to obtain patent licensing fees from Linux system before the birth of Android, so from the source, these recent events are only the inevitable result.
In 2007, Microsoft claimed that Linux infringed its 235 patents, but the details of these patents were never released by Microsoft. Microsoft's consistent strategy is to negotiate directly with those companies that apply Linux technology and sign patent licensing agreements. Many large companies including Amazon, Novell, Linspire and TurboLinux have signed patent licensing agreements with Microsoft to protect the interests of companies and users. There are also some vendors who use Linux kernel in their own devices. After being threatened by Microsoft, they directly choose to remove related functions from the devices, such as TomTom.
From the list of Microsoft suing Motorola, we can roughly imagine the outline of these 235 patents, most of which should involve some basic functions that have been widely used in modern operating systems and become breathing. If we want to avoid Microsoft's patent, it means re-manufacturing the wheel, which is a very sad thing for the whole computer industry.