Google Inc. signed a pact to pool some of its wireless technologies with companies such as AT&T Inc. to make licensing industrywide standards cheaper and easier for mobile device makers.
The company agreed Thursday to include all of its patents for essential LTE and 4G technologies, most of which it acquired from Motorola Mobility, in a pool run by Dolby Laboratories Inc.’s Via Licensing. The pool of technologies will be available for licensing to other companies at a single rate.
By joining the pool, Google enters a debate that has splintered the technology industry and creates some public inconsistencies for the company. On Wednesday, lawyers for Google challenged a verdict won by Microsoft Corp. that Motorola Mobility breached a pledge to license standard-essential patents for Wi-Fi and video compression on fair and reasonable terms.
While declining to comment on the Microsoft case, Google’s head of patent licensing said the company considers patent pools a “creative solution” to the fight that has pitted companies that developed wireless technologies against those that use them in complex devices such as smartphones and tablets.
“The pools offer a very nice option -- one of many options -- that can be used to license standard-essential patents,” said Brian Blasius, Google’s senior patent-licensing manager. “It provides a simplistic, predictable and lower cost model to make available licenses to the 4G technology. We hope other licensors will jump on board and join us.”
‘Both Sides’
The fight over licensing rates centers on how to value standard-essential patents. The companies that did the research say mobile phones won’t work without their technologies and that they deserve just compensation. Electronics makers say smartphones have so many features that the patents shouldn’t be based on a device’s sales price but on the much smaller value of an individual feature.
The difference between Google’s position in the Microsoft case and in joining the pool puts the company “kind of on both sides of that fence,” said David Long, a patent lawyer with Kelley Drye in Washington. Long runs a blog that looks at legal cases involving standard-essential patents.
The bulk of the patents included in the pool Google obtained when it bought Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. Google has since sold off the handset business and retained the patents, and then purchased wireless patents from other companies. Motorola, and later Motorola Mobility, historically had a policy of trying to get high royalties from its research.
“Now there’s been a change with it going over to Google,” Long said. “Google is certainly an innovator in its own right but it has a different business model.”
Interchangeable Components
Standards are developed so devices can work together and help make devices both easier to use and cheaper because components can be interchangeable. It often takes years for competing companies to agree on a single standard, and all participants have to agree to license any relevant patents to anyone who needs them.
That’s easier said than done.
“The device manufacturer knows how to build their individual device and they know they need intellectual property rights,” said John Ehler, director of wireless programs at Via. “The question is how do you do it? You can go to each of the companies in the industry or wait until they knock on your door. We make it easier.”
Some of the bigger players don’t want to join pools because it means less money and they want a profit from the time and money spent developing new technologies.
Still, the pool rate could be used as a reference point for other negotiations, Ehler said. That’s what the judge did in the Microsoft case to put a value on the Motorola Mobility Wi-Fi patents -- and Google is objecting.
“The reason the patent pools get disparaged is there’s a view that some of these patent pools have very low-quality patents,” Long said. “It was a good get for this pool to get Motorola’s LTE patents, because it’s in the sweet spot of their innovation.”
Google isn’t part of Via’s pool on the Wi-Fi standard, Ehler said. Blasius said Google opted to join the LTE patent pool because of its importance to today’s devices.
“The LTE and 4g is the latest technology to be adopted around the world and there’s been significant interest in the licensing of those patents,” he said. “Mobile phones today are likely to include LTE functionality and it’s expanding globally faster than anyone had imagined.”
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