Legal issues of Android

Both Android and Android phone
manufacturers have been involved in
numerous patent lawsuits. On August 12,
2010, Oracle sued Google over claimed
infringement of copyrights and patents
related to the Java programming language.
[188] Oracle originally sought damages up to
$6.1 billion, [189] but this valuation was
rejected by a United States federal judge who
asked Oracle to revise the estimate. [190] In
response, Google submitted multiple lines of
defense, counterclaiming that Android did not
infringe on Oracle's patents or copyright, that
Oracle's patents were invalid, and several
other defenses. They said that Android is
based on Apache Harmony, a clean room
implementation of the Java class libraries,
and an independently developed virtual
machine called Dalvik. [191] In May 2012, the
jury in this case found that Google did not
infringe on Oracle's patents, and the trial
judge ruled that the structure of the Java
APIs used by Google was not copyrightable.
[192][193]
In addition to lawsuits against Google directly,
various proxy wars have been waged against
Android indirectly by targeting manufacturers
of Android devices, with the effect of
discouraging manufacturers from adopting
the platform by increasing the costs of
bringing an Android device to market. [194]
Both Apple and Microsoft have sued several
manufacturers for patent infringement, with
Apple's ongoing legal action against Samsung
being a particularly high-profile case. In
October 2011, Microsoft said they had signed
patent license agreements with ten Android
device manufacturers, whose products
account for 55% of the worldwide revenue for
Android devices.[195] These include Samsung
and HTC .[196] Samsung's patent settlement
with Microsoft includes an agreement that
Samsung will allocate more resources to
developing and marketing phones running
Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
[194]
Google has publicly expressed its frustration
for the current patent landscape in the
United States, accusing Apple, Oracle and
Microsoft of trying to take down Android
through patent litigation, rather than
innovating and competing with better
products and services. [197] In 2011–12,
Google purchased Motorola Mobility for US
$12.5 billion, which was viewed in part as a
defensive measure to protect Android, since
Motorola Mobility held more than 17,000
patents. [198] In December 2011, Google
bought over a thousand patents from IBM .
[199]
In 2013, Fairsearch, a lobbying organization
supported by Microsoft, Oracle and others,
filed a complaint regarding Android with the
European Commission, alleging that its free
of charge distribution model constituted anti-
competitive predatory pricing . The Free
Software Foundation Europe , whose donors
include Google, disputed the Fairsearch
allegations. [200]