Microsoft sues Motorola, citing Android patent infringement (ars technica)

"An abstraction layer for interfacing a computer to a telephony radio, comprising: a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for abstracting out multiple radio technologies without knowledge of the telephony radio or cellular network, wherein the set of APIs correspond to call control functions, wherein the abstraction layer comprises a proxy layer and a driver layer, wherein when the proxy layer receives a call at a first interface to one of the set of APIs, the proxy layer transforms the API call to a command understood by the driver layer and sends the command to the driver layer at a second interface, and wherein the driver layer receives the command at the second interface and determines at least one standard telephony radio command corresponding to the called API and sends the telephony radio command to the telephony radio at a third interface, and wherein the proxy layer is hardware independent and the driver is hardware specific."

The value of this so-called "invention" is directly proportional to its value to rule out the standard engineering practice of any and all competitors in the field. That is the main problem with most software patents, most don't cover anything rightly termed an "invention" at all.

Standard engineering practice is not an invention. This sort of thing (abstraction layers for interface conversion) goes back decades. Outside of software it goes back centuries. The only remotely "inventive" aspect of this claim is applying standard engineering practice to a mobile phone. The only conclusion one can make is that either the patent examiners are remarkably stupid or naive, or the standards of the USPTO are so lax as to be non-existent.