Android phones under legal attack from Rockstar

Rockstar Bidco, a consortium jointly owned by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson, and Sony, has filed a raft of lawsuits against eight Android handset manufacturers, underlining the high-stake patent battles in the telecommunications space.

The Rockstar consortium today kick-started the barrage of lawsuits against defendants that include Google, Samsung, LG Electronics, HTC, and Huawei - in other words, all the big players in the Android market.

Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder and chief executive officer, had promised to "destroy Android" because it was "a stolen product". He told his biographer Walter Isaacson that that he was "willing to go thermonuclear war" on the use of the platform.

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion (the money that Apple held at the time) in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs had said.

Rockstar bought the patents under question during Nortel's bankruptcy auction. Google bid as much as $4.4 billion for the patents, but Rockstar outbid the search giant with a $4.5-billion bid.

The lawsuit charges the companies with a number of patent infringements, the most damaging of which may be that Google infringes patents by matching search terms to relevant advertising on mobile devices.

The suit could have a huge effect on Google because the company's game plan with Android relies on giving away the operating system in order to make money from advertising.

The Rockstar consortium was created to buy and sell patents, without creating any actual products or innovations. This is known in the business as a non-practicing entity - or less generously, a 'patent troll'.

While it has been quiet for the past couple of years, reports suggest that Rockstar has been spending the years reverse-engineering Android devices with the express intent of finding patent violations.

These latest barrage of lawsuits seem to be the fruits of that effort. They are particularly damaging to Android machines (See: Microsoft, Apple, Sony consortium sues Google, others for patent infringement).