Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?

If these numbers are accurate, then yuck!!! My disgust for software patents just went up even further.<p>More seriously, I have a question for those who know more about this...<p>1. Are these generic, broad &quot;idea&quot; patents and hence there is nothing Google&#x2F;OEMs can really do here to avoid licensing them? If not, why don&#x27;t they use an alternative implementation to avoid the conflict?<p>2. If the answer to #1 is yes, how does Apple avoid this problem? Are they also licensing from Microsoft? Or is Apple in some sort of a mutual cross-licensing agreement here to fight the common enemy Google?

How can a company so shamelessly extract money (through forceful deals, no doubt) from an <i>open source</i> OS, and get away with it?<p>Linux companies dodged this bullet for the most part, from both Microsoft and SCU, but it seems Microsoft &quot;succeeded&quot; this time against Android with their mostly garbage patents in the same way patent trolls and mass-bittorrent lawsuits have succeeded so far - by scaring people&#x2F;companies into paying up, <i>without</i> having to get into any lawsuit, which is exactly what patent trolls have been doing for a while.<p>As soon as B&amp;N was about to invalidate some of their main patents, they quickly &quot;invested&quot; $300 million into B&amp;N (i.e. they settled), and B&amp;N dropped the lawsuit. I wish more OEM&#x27;s would&#x27;ve had the <i>balls</i> to call their bluff.<p>So EFF - any proposals for stopping <i>corporate</i> patent trolls like Microsoft, Rockstar Consortium and Intellectual Ventures, yet?

Why is everyone taking these numbers as fact when neither the article nor analyst offer anything to back up these claims?<p>The people submitting and upvoting stories like this are just as responsible for the shoddy state of tech journalism as these bloggers are.

I always thought HTC and Samsung were exempt from these royalties by releasing their own Windows Phones. That&#x27;s why Samsung doesn&#x27;t care at all about their WP offerings.<p>Samsung, HTC, Apple and Nokia should account for over 50% of the global market. If my assumptions are correct, are the rest of the smaller players able to pay that much money on royalties alone?<p>I&#x27;ll like to see some numbers. The article is seriously lacking data.

<p><pre><code> Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform. </code></pre> Wow, I would have never imagined the Xbox division to be in dire straits.

Earn (verb): &#x27;gain or incur deservedly in return for one&#x27;s behavior or achievements.&#x27;<p>So why change the article&#x27;s title, HN?

How much money is Ubuntu and Firefox budgeting for patent licenses on their mobile OS?

I like when some staimate from some analyst without any real figure is stated as a fact

The mobile phone business is essentially a cartel where only very big players are able to enter the market. Why is this allowed to exist? I couldn&#x27;t start my own company and compete in this space.

This might be more than what Google earns from Android.

Hopefully - and I really hope this - most of these patents are stupid stuff from the early days of graphical operating systems and are ready to expire in the next few years (given a 20 year lifespan for most patents).

A clear demonstration that patent racket is a lucrative &quot;business&quot;.

With software, is it out of the question to re-engineer the code so it no longer needs licensing? Why hasn&#x27;t Android already done that?

does anyone know which patents they&#x27;re asserting? FAT?

You gotta be kidding me.

Dre Day only made Easy&#x27;s pay day...

...claims analyst, with absolutely nothing backing up their claim. The headline appears as if Microsoft accountants stated this as a fact, when in reality this is someone essentially reading tea leaves.<p>Further it&#x27;s worth noting that the division that these Android royalties are attributed to also garners all other patent licensing royalties of any sort (e.g. FAT), as well as licensing charges such as ActiveSync licensing (ergo, every iPhone, among others).

I&#x27;m not surprised the XBox division is bleeding so much cash. Microsoft should never have gotten into the hardware business in the first place. Every time they release a new piece of hardware is cause for a face-palm.<p>15 years ago, when no console maker had a viable strategy for going online, MS should have built a cross platform solution that made online gaming possible for every console. Does that sound familiar? A cross-platform solution for a number of competing hardware makers?<p>This division would probably be a huge part of Microsoft&#x27;s business if they had pulled it off. Just think of the leveraging possibilities if every gamer over the age of 25 had an XBox live account, instead of the much smaller subset of gamers over 25 who also owned a Microsoft console.<p>I think they&#x27;re back on the right track with Windows phone, but Google already beat them to the cross-platform solution.