To the last, I will grapple with thee… from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee! Oh, bugger that crapola! Apple and Steve Jobs’ thermonuclear war, at least the part involving Google directly, has been called off and replaced by patent peace or, at the very least, a close substitute.
When Google purchased Motorola in 2012, the company inherited the conflict. Whether or not you agreed with Motorola’s attempts to user its extensive patent portfolio to legally blot the iPhone out of existence, it has been a failure.
Apparently, both Google and Apple now agree on the futility of their patent war.
“Apple and Google have agreed to dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly between the two companies,” reads the statement from the two companies. “Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform. The agreement does not include a cross license.”
Terms of the agreement aren’t known. That said, Wired speculates there are three possibilities seem to be available:
— Either Apple paid cash to make the suits go away;
— Google accepted some relatively small figure to simply save face and end the fight;
— Or both sides decided that the courts, in their rulings, weren’t likely to give either of them much of a competitive edge over the other.
Patent peace in our time then? Maybe not.
At the very least, the Apple vs Samsung patent war isn’t covered by the Apple + Google deal announced tonight. So, it’s perhaps inevitable that Apple vs Samsung will continue on and on forever and ever…
What’s your take?