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In a decisive twist to the sprawling smartphone wars, it appears the government intends to sue some of the participants over their use of patents. . . .

The problem is Google’s use of so-called standards-essential patents. Those are patents it has already disclosed to a standards-setting body as being important to the functioning of some type of technology standard.

If Google ends up being on the business end of a government lawsuit because of smartphone patents, it would be surprising, mainly because Google isn’t the company that actually initiated the whole brouhaha. The smartphone patent battles were mainly kicked off by Apple and Microsoft, seeking royalty payments from Android phones, as well as legacy companies that aren’t really active in the space, like Kodak.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/ftc-staff-us-should-sue-google-for-misuse-of-standards-based-patents/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.