Target: Android

One way to know that a product has become successful is to see others lining up to attack it in the courts. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but FUD and lawsuits also show, in a rather less sincere way, a certain form of respect. By this measure, the Android system, by virtue of being the target of both, must be riding high indeed.

At the top of the news is Microsoft's just-announced lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, an American bookstore chain. According to Microsoft, the Nook ebook reader, which is based on Android, violates five of Microsoft's software patents. By now, the fact that these patents cover trivial "innovations" should not come as a surprise. Here is a quick overview of what Microsoft claims to own:

• #5,778,372: "Remote retrieval and display management of electronic document with incorporated images." What's described here is displaying a document on top of a background image with the brilliant feature that the document is displayed while the image is still transferring and the whole page is redrawn once the image shows up.

• #5,889,522: "System provided child window controls." This patent covers an application settings dialog with tabs.

• #6,339,780: "Loading status in a hypermedia browser having a limited available display area." This patent covers the idea of putting up a "loading" image over a page while the page is loading.

• #6,891,551: "Selection handles in editing electronic documents." Covered here is the technique of putting little images around a selection area so that the user can, by dragging those handles, resize the area.

• #6,957,233: "Method and apparatus for capturing and rendering annotations for non-modifiable electronic content" - a method for storing "annotations" outside of the text of a read-only document. Broadly read, this patent could be said to cover browser bookmarks, an idea that somebody might just have thought of before this patent's 1999 filing date.

It seems unlikely that any of these patents would stand up against a suitably determined challenge in court - though such an opinion does certainly rely on a possibly naïve view of the rationality of American patent courts. In the real world, challenging patents is a time-consuming and expensive affair. Barnes & Noble, which may well have been chosen because it looks like a weak target, may not have an appetite for that kind of fight. That said, the company has, evidently, refused offers to license these patents from Microsoft; its management had to know that a lawsuit would be the next step.

Perhaps we'll see a counterattack from the rest of the industry; the idea of paying rent to Microsoft for the privilege of using bookmarks is unlikely to have broad appeal. Or, perhaps, the entire mobile marketplace in the US will simply collapse under the weight of the steadily increasing pile of patent-related lawsuits.

The patent suit is not the only attack ongoing against Android currently; there is also, seemingly, a determined FUD campaign underway. Most recently, this campaign has taken the form of assertions that Android is violating the Linux kernel's license; LWN examined those claims in a separate article. It's worth noting that one of the proponents of these claims has represented Microsoft in the past - a fact which he chose to remove from his online biography shortly before beginning the attack.

The goal of these attacks seems clear - to inject fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the growing Android ecosystem. Hardware vendors have been served notice that they may well be sued for using Android. Software vendors are being told that writing for Android could expose them to copyright infringement claims. It's all aimed at getting these companies to reconsider investing in Android in favor of the "safer" alternatives.

The thing is, of course, we have seen this kind of FUD campaign before. As early as the 1990's, people were warning that use of Linux could cause companies to "lose their intellectual property." Fortunately, most companies have figured out that they face no such threat. So, when we see something like this ludicrous claim:

We can relax in the knowledge that we have seen such things before. Linux turns out to be surprisingly resilient to FUD; this campaign seems unlikely to even slow things down.

It is worth noting that, despite the recent claims that companies working with Android might be sued by free software developers, the actual lawsuit was filed by a company which is generally hostile to free software. There are indeed threats out there, but they do not come from our community; they come from companies which feel they are losing in the market and which, as such companies so often do, are turning to the courts instead. It is one of the less pleasant signs of success; our community should feel flattered indeed.

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