Report: Justice Department probing "anti-Android" patent deal

Aug 1, 2011, 20:30 GMT

San Francisco - The US Justice Department is investigating whether a group of companies that snapped up patents from telecom equipment maker Nortel could use the patents to hobble Google's Android operating system, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Headed by Google rivals Apple, Microsoft and Research in Motion, the six-member consortium's winning bid for the 6,000 patents from bankrupt Canadian firm Nortel Networks was five times higher than Google's offer. The 4.5-billion-dollar deal stunned many observers.

According to the report, Justice Department officials are interviewing consortium members to see whether they plan to use the newly acquired patents to sue makers of Android smartphones.

The report came amid increasingly contentious legal battles between the rival smartphone companies, which according to observers could stifle innovation and mire potential future developments in costly patent wars.

Microsoft has already demanded 15 dollars from Samsung for every Android device it sells, while Apple and HTC are locked in a patent war. Google bought more than 1,000 patents last week from IBM in a move widely interpreted as a defensive measure against the buyers of the Nortel patents.

Nortel's patents could provide their new owners with a key weapon, because the patents cover technologies at the center of the fourth-generation mobile networks now being rolled out in the United States and other markets. The Justice Department and the companies involved declined to comment on the report.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Google general counsel Kent Walker last week voiced those fears.

The bid was 'a sign of companies coming together not to buy new technology, not to buy great engineers or great products, but to buy the legal right to stop other people from innovating,' Walker said.