Google is standing ‘on the shoulder of companies like Microsoft who made all these billions of dollars in investments‘ with its Android mobile OS, claims Horacio Gutiérrez, deputy general counsel in charge of Microsoft’s intellectual property group.
Gutiérrez makes this claim in an interview with SFGate.
Speaking in relation to the huge amount of litigation currently going on between mobile device players, Gutiérrez said that ‘there is a period of unrest and a period of readjustment, until the claims on the ownership of different pieces of technology are well known’ and that licensing and cross-licensing is required to make these problems ‘disappear into the background.’
Gutiérrez also believes that ‘licensing is not some nefarious thing that people should be worried about’ but instead ‘the solution to the patent problem that people are reacting so negatively about.’
Gutiérrez goes on to defend the software patent system, claiming that ’many things that earlier were implemented in hardware … are now implemented in software’ and that the ‘patent system has actually played a role in securing the leadership that the United States has in this field.’
