Microsoft and Apple team up to barrage Google in the smartphone patent war

New litigation follows the $4.5bn purchase of a patent portfolio by a tech consortium known as 'Rockstar'

A slew of patent lawsuits have been launched against Google and its Android partners by a technology consortium consisting of Microsoft, Apple, BlackBerry, Sony, and Ericsson.

The group have banded together under the name Rockstar to attack the search giant’s smartphone business in what is being described as a ‘nuclear attack’ in the smartphone patent wars.

The new lawsuits are based on a portfolio of more than 6,000 patents that was purchased by Rockstar from Canadian telecommunication company Nortel after it went bankrupt in 2009.

Google had initially offer $900 million for the patents before a bidding war between the search giant and Rockstar pushed up the price to $4.5 billion (£2.8bn).

Following their defeat Google purchased the hardware division of Motorola for $12.5bn, a deal which is thought to have been partly motivated by Motorola’s own extensive patent library – a pre-emptive defence against the current litigation.

The suits that have been filed this week target Google as well as its hardware partners that make Android smartphones: Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG Electronics, Asustek, Pantech, and ZTE.

The patents allegedly being infringed upon cover a wide range of technology, from technical protocols involving 4G communication to a patent for an “associative search engine” that “provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network”.

The smartphone patent wars began in earnest back in 2009 but had thought to be dying down.

However, this string of new lawsuits as well as the announcement earlier this week of a successful suit brought against HTC by Microsoft-owned Nokia suggests that no one is yet prepared to lay down their weapons.

This is not a surprise given the stake involved. The global mobile market is expected to be worth $341.4bn in 2015 with smartphones accounting for 75.8 per cent of this revenue, according to a report from Markets and Markets.

Google and its various partners have been doing particularly well recently, with Android devices accounting for more than 80 per cent of the market in the third quarter of 2013, according to research from Strategy Analytics.