Microsoft, Apple withdraw from Android patent trolling: Is the patent war drawing to a close?

After years of relentless litigation, it seems the mobile/smartphone patent war might be drawing to a close. Rockstar, a patent trolling company owned by Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson, and BlackBerry, has agreed to cancel the lawsuits it had filed against Google and most Android device makers. Rockstar will also sell off its remaining patents (some 4,000 of them) to a company called RPX, which has promised to license the patents to anyone who needs them for defensive purposes. This follows on from news this summer that Apple and Google had agreed to drop all lawsuits between the two companies, and Apple and Samsung agreed to drop all lawsuits outside the US.

The patent wars — or patent trolling, depending on your point of view — originally started to heat up in the 1980s, as the Information/Digital Age began to gather a lot of inertia. Patents weren’t originally designed with software in mind, and they’re also not very good at responding to periods of rapid innovation. As you can imagine, this in turn meant that patents were rather ill-suited to protecting the innovations of tech companies that were quickly becoming very rich and powerful. At some point, these companies (or their lawyers) realized that patents were a great way of stymieing the opposition or extorting them out of a few million dollars.

The smartphone patent war, at the end of 2011. It got a lot worse in 2012, but I don’t have an updated graphic.

There was a smattering of high-profile patent cases in the ’80s and ’90s — Intel vs. AMD; a spat between McAfee, Symantec, and other antivirus companies; the one-click patent war between Amazon and Barnes & Noble — but these all pale in comparison to the smartphone patent war. In 2007, the iPhone created a new, massively popular market segment — and unsurprisingly, companies with a lot of intellectual property in the computing and mobile spaces (Microsoft, Qualcomm, Nokia, Samsung) suddenly wanted to cash in on their huge patent portfolios. For more on the topic (it’s a big one), see our featured story The Patent Wars: Are they killing innovation?
In 2011, a consortium of companies (Rockstar) led by Microsoft and Apple bought Nortel’s portfolio of 6,000 patents for $4.5 billion. Nortel had been a telecommunications and network equipment giant, and thus its patents covered some very important innovations. A couple of years later, in 2013, Rockstar launched a massive attack against Android, suing Google and most Android device makers. With Microsoft and Apple both developing their own mobile ecosystems, it was hard not to see Rockstar’s attack as out and out patent trolling.

A graph from a White House report, showing the uptick in patent trolls, mostly caused by mobile/smartphone cases.

Now, as of yesterday afternoon, it appears that Rockstar is pulling out of the smartphone war entirely. It will drop all of its lawsuits against Google and Android OEMs, and sell around 4,000 patents to a company called RPX for $900 million. (The remaining 2,000 patents were presumably retained by members of the Rockstar consortium for defensive means.) RPX is kind of like the nice version of a patent troll: It accumulates patents, which can then be licensed by anyone for a reasonable price. In this case, RPX specifically purchased the Nortel patents for a syndicate of around 30 tech companies, including Google and Cisco.
“Peace is breaking out,” RPX’s CEO John Amster told the Wall Street Journal. “I think people have started to realize that licensing, not litigation, is the best way to make use of patents, and this deal is a significant acknowledgment of that reality.” The wider patent warfare landscape certainly seems that way, too. Back in May, Apple and Google agreed to drop their numerous suits and countersuits. Apple and Samsung reached a similar decision, too. There are still lots of outstanding cases, but relative to the hundreds of suits that were filed between 2011 and 2013, 2014 was mostly a very quiet year for new mobile/smartphone lawsuits. It does indeed seem that the smartphone patent war, kickstarted by the iPhone in 2007, is finally drawing to a close.