News » Google and Microsoft Take It Outside

A top Google lawyer drew attention to Android's beleaguered patent position recently with a public blog post that took the platform's top attackers to task over what the attorney called "bogus" patents. Public rebukes like this may be relatively rare, but they have their place. Meanwhile, RIM seeded new BlackBerries, McAfee smelled a rat, and AT&T users got ready for a good throttling.

By just about any measure, the Android mobile platform is making a killing in the U.S. As of last March, comScore said over a third of U.S. smartphone subscribers use Android phones. Every major U.S. carrier supports Android phones, every major handset maker in the world not named "RIM," "Apple" or "Nokia" makes Android phones, and the platform's app selection is almost as ridiculously diverse as Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL).

But despite all that success, Android is causing a gut-full of worry for its parent company, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). Over the last several months, some of Google's biggest enemies -- Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Apple and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), to name a few -- have targeted Android with claims of patent infringement. Sometimes they go after Google itself, or sometimes they go after handset makers that build Android phones, but the message is largely the same: They claim that some technology used by Android infringes on a patent they own, either because they invented it themselves or because they bought the patent from some other company.

Sometimes the fight happens in court; sometimes it's over with a threat and a settlement. But Google's getting sick of seeing Android picked on, and this week it publicly called out its enemies for what it called "a hostile, organized campaign against Android."

In a company blog post, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond accused Android's enemies of teaming up to buy patents at Nortel's (NYSE: NT) postmortem estate sale, as well as a few patents that Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) put on the block, just so Google couldn't get them. He wrote that even though phone makers can use Android for free, Microsoft is trying to make Android phones more expensive to build than Windows phones by pressuring phone makers into paying Redmond licensing fees in order to avoid possible patent trouble. And he accused Google's rivals of competing by filing lawsuits rather than making their own products better.

Microsoft was quick to slap back, though. Company officials responded within hours by posting an email from a few months ago in which a Google executive turns down a Microsoft offer to bid on the Novell patents jointly. So if Google thinks Microsoft's playing a game of billion-dollar keep-away, why didn't it go in for halfsies when it had the chance? It kind of made it look like one of Google's hands didn't know what the right was doing.

But a few hours after that, Google made its reply. Drummond said Google saw the Microsoft offer for what it was: a trick. If Google had shared rights with Microsoft, he said, it might have been able to use the technologies they covered, but it wouldn't have been able to use the patents to protect Android from Microsoft, because Microsoft would have owned the patents too.

To that, Microsoft's head of corporate communications, Frank X. Shaw, countered that really Google just wanted the patents all to itself.

Lawyers often prefer to save the shouting matches for the courtroom -- public bickering like this may be interesting to watch, but it doesn't do much to sway a judge one way or the other. Still, Google may have a good reason for speaking out like this.

Patent law is a tangled mess, and it's an issue that's gaining a growing amount of attention among investors, developers and even consumers. The more the public hears about Android's patent problems, the less confidence they have in the platform, and that could hurt Google just as much as an unfavorable court ruling. By striking back against its opponents in a public forum like this, Google at least gets the message across that it thinks it has a strong case and it's going to put up a fight.