Google and Rockstar have agreed to settle their patent case. Rockstar is a consortium that exists to license Nortel patents after that company went bankrupt. They had a tone of patents. Rockstar members include mostly Apple, but also Blackberry, Ericsson, Microsoft and Sony. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Rockstar also sued HTC, Huawei and Samsung. They wanted to go after everyone who ever made a router , everyone who ever did anything basically, so the bigger news here is that this agreement strongly suggests that the patent wars are over. We won’t know for sure until we see the details but this is my initial read on it.
Google at a certain point started buying a bunch of patents from Motorola and other places, and they have law suits all over the world, which are getting really expensive. While the companies can afford it, I think Tim Cook is more pragmatic than Steve Jobs. He decided they should just focus on making their own stuff rather than playing the dirty patent games. This doesn’t mean that all the patent litigation is going to stop, since there’s lot of trolls out there who freelance, but remember how Steve Jobs went nuclear when he saw Android, and that led to a bunch of crazy lawyers suing everyone everywhere. This represents a big step back, so a little bit of history is helpful. You might remember Nortel. After the bankruptcy, Nortel patents went up for sale in 2010, right when the patent stuff was peaking, and there was a massive bidding war. Google lost that, after it offered $4.4 billion and lost that to a consortium of the companies led by Apple who paid $4.5 billion. After that people have been just suing all over the place. But now it seems that they are walking it back, and there might be peace in the land.