The patent fight over Android is leading to an inescapable conclusion.
Google has a business problem that demands a political solution.
The problem here is software patents. More precisely, business method patents encoded in software.
Ever since the State Street case of 1998 it's been open season for patenting business methods through software.
Before State Street, software patents were highly limited. You had to tie the patent claim to a particular device. Software might control a patented machine, but it was the machine that was patented, not the software. Certainly not what the machine did.
State Street changed this. By making methods of doing business subject to patent, all someone had to do was implement a business method through software and run to the patent office. This was made worse by the normal patent game of getting narrow protections through the patent office, then making broad claims for those patents in court.
That's what has happened to Android. Just about anything you could do in a smartphone has been patented. It doesn't matter that the Android design is based on Linux. In fact, Microsoft claims it has patents on Linux, which was created in the early 1990s out of Unix, a technology from the 1960s.
What has changed and why this matters can be seen by looking at a business that is very much pro-patent and built on patents, medicine.
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