Subpoenas replace six-shooters in wild-West-style battles for mobile gold

From sly chicanery to blatant strong-arming, green-eyed prospectors of the lawless wild, wild West went to great lengths to lay claim to as much valuable land as possible — often at the expense of fellow pioneers and innocent bystanders.

Replace pioneers with mobile phone companies, gold mines with patents, and six-shooters with subpoenas, and you have a pretty good picture of today’s mobile market. Ironically, the wild, wild wildness persists, not due to a lack of laws but rather to a patent and legal system that rewards such behavior.

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Much of the mad scrambling among vendors to secure rights to valuable caches of key mobile technologies smacks of desperation, pettiness, and greed as they enrich lawyers and clog up the courtrooms. The prize is evidently too valuable to pass up: millions in potential licensing dollars for the company that can confuse judges and juries into thinking it and it alone came up with “innovative” phone technologies such as the ability for a user to enter a specific string of numeric characters into his or her mobile device and connect with another user’s mobile device, thus engaging in voice-based communication — that is, to make a phone call.

OK, so no company (to my knowledge) is claiming a patent on making a mobile call, but frankly, many of the details being disputed seem about as common to phones — and computing devices in general — as carburetors and transmissions are to automobiles. Maybe it’s possible companies have developed similar mobile technologies simultaneously without malice or criminal intent?

Microsoft, for example, claims Motorola’s Android smartphone is infringing on Redmond-spawned patents for email, contacts, and calendar synchronization; scheduling meetings; and notifying applications of changes in signal and battery strength. I think we’ve seen similar technologies on computing devices, mobile and otherwise, long before Android was born.

Motorola, meanwhile, claims that the Apple iPhone and iPad are infringing on patented technologies found in its aforementioned Android Phones, such as “wireless e-mail, proximity sensing, application management, and location-based services.” Again, those seem oddly familiar.

The list of companies seeking to cash in on patent rights goes on — and on and on and on. Oracle has sued Google over its use of Java. Apple has sued HTC. Nokia has sued Apple. Kodak has sued RIM and Apple. There are dozens of others; the Guardian has a nifty visual aid.

Granted, I’m not a lawyer or an engineer, but it seems entirely possible and plausible that some of the various patent suits represent a worthy claim on the part of a company that has devised a truly new, innovative technology that competitors should indeed have to pay to use. But my hunch is many don’t fall under that category.

Rather, when the dust clears, some hardware and software makers (and certainly lawyers) will be a little richer from licensing agreements; other vendors will be a little poorer. Ultimately, users are going to suffer because they’ll be funding all these lawsuits. Meanwhile, emerging mobile-tech companies with truly innovative ideas may find it more prudent to sell their innovations to the Microsofts, Googles, and Apples of the world, rather than risk going public and facing costly court battles.

This article, “Subpoenas replace six-shooters in wild-West-style battles for mobile gold,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.