Another Android Device Maker Signs Patent Agreement With Microsoft

doperative writes with this quote from El Reg: "Microsoft has nailed a second Android device maker to a patent licensing agreement. The Redmond software giant announced on Monday that General Dynamics Itronix has signed a patent agreement that will provide 'broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio.' In other words, General Dynamics Itronix has agreed to licensing certain, unnamed Microsoft patents for use with Android-powered portables."

Contract implies permission required

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I've added them to the list:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Software_distributors_paying_Microsoft_patent_tax [swpat.org]

The costs being passed on is bad enough, but it's also worrying to note that these deals include an implied admission by the signees that they need MS's permission for the distribution of their products.

That means MS can cancel their business at any time, and it implies that no one else can develop for that platform without MS's permission.

Re:Honest question

[Trillan]

Since RIM and HP both have mobile patent portfolios of their own, I imagine there is some variety of cross-licensing at work (and possibly cash transfers, one way or the other). I think RIM and Microsoft are suing each other as well.

Re:Microsoft made a deal with GDI?

[TheReverandND]

It's a Command and Conquer Reference

Re:I'm glad Motorola, at least, is fighting

[Raenex]

At some point these "unnamed patents" that are allegedly being infringed need to see the light of day.

It took a surprising amount of searching to find it, as most of the stories did not list the patents, but I found a couple of sites ([1] [ismashphone.com], [2] [patentlyapple.com]) that have them. Here's the list from [2]:

• U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517 ("the '517 patent") entitled: "Common name space for long and short filenames." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to data processing systems and, more particularly, to a common name space for long and short filenames.
• U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352 ("the '352 patent") entitled: "Common name space for long and short filenames."
• U.S. Patent No. 6,621,746 ("the '746 patent") entitled: "Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to flash memory devices, and more particularly, monitoring when to perform an erase operation in a flash memory device."
• U.S. Patent No. 6,826,762 ("the '762 patent") entitled: "Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to application programming interfaces (APIs) and, even more particularly, relates to a Radio Interface Layer comprising a set of APIs." Only this patent within the group relates to the product known as the "Motorola Charm."
• U.S. Patent No. 6,909,910 ("the '910 patent") entitled: "Method and system for managing changes to a contact database." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to mobile computing, and more particularly to updating a contact database within a mobile computing device."
• U.S. Patent No. 7,644,376 ("the '376 patent") entitled: "Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes." Microsoft states in their patent that "Briefly described, the present invention is directed at unifying state and notification architecture across devices."
• U.S. Patent No. 5,664,133 ("the '133 patent") entitled: "Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates "to the field of user interfaces for computer systems, and more particularly to graphical user interfaces wherein a user selects from a collection of graphical representations displayed upon a video screen corresponding to actual computer resources."
• U.S. Patent No. 6,578,054 ("the '054 patent") entitled: "Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information." According to Microsoft, the patent generally relates to "to the support of on-line and off-line transmission and synchronization of data. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods that eliminate redundant data transmission and allow multiple copies of data to be synchronized so that incremental changes made to one copy of the data can be identified, transferred, and incorporated into the other copy of the data, regardless of whether the incremental changes are made on-line or off-line."
• U.S. Patent No. 6,370,566 ("the '566 patent") entitled: "Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device." Microsoft's patent abstract describes the patent this way: The present invention includes a mobile device which provides the user with the ability to schedule a meeting request from the mobile device itself. The mobile device creates an object representative of the meeting request and assigns the object a global identification number which uniquely identifies the object to other devices which encounter the object. In addition, the mobile devic