Well, to be fair, the filing date on that patent is Dec 1, 2004. Absent genuine industrial espionage, it would have been rather hard for the Google Desktop tea

Well, to be fair, the filing date on that patent is Dec 1, 2004. Absent genuine industrial espionage, it would have been rather hard for the Google Desktop team to have been aware of it in October 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop Or are you saying Google should have checked for new patents (and patent applications - this wasn't issued until December 2011) before re-implementing something they'd already done on the desktop on an Android phone?