> Wait, seriously? That's it? that's the patent MS uses to force cellphone manufacturers to pay them for Android? No, that is not "the" patent. That is one pa

> Wait, seriously? That's it? that's the patent MS uses to force cellphone manufacturers to pay them for Android? No, that is not "the" patent. That is one patent. Microsoft has more. They also have patents that they're not even revealing, because they like to do blanket cross-licenses. One could argue that it is Microsoft's strongest patent, and therefore its loss puts their patent revenues at risk. This is a version of the Oracle/Google scenario, but for patents rather than for copyright. On the other hand, one could also argue that it is Microsoft's weakest patent, which they threw out there as a sacrificial lamb. Any patent that they revealed would be subject to intense scrutiny. Thus, it's safer to use a large number of trivial patents rather than a small number of more involved patents. (Especially if the legal system is so broken that both types of patents have an equal chance of prevailing. If it's totally random, then you don't gain anything by using a stronger patent.) This would be the IBM/Sun scenario. IBM went to Sun and claimed that they were violating a patent. Sun replied that the IBM patent was obvious, so it would easily get struck down. Then the IBM lawyer pointed out that IBM had tens of thousands of patents. If Sun could get this one patent struck down, then IBM could just repeat the process with another patent, and they'd never run out. So in the end, Sun ended up buying a blanket license for all of IBM's patents.