When you hear about lawsuits concerning Samsung, there is a good chance that Apple will be involved, but not this time. It seems that Microsoft has recently taken Samsung to court over Android royalties which Samsung is apparently no longer willing to pay. As most of you guys know, Microsoft owns Android-related patents which forces OEMs to pay them if they want to build Android devices.
For example we have companies like ZTE, ViewSonic, Acer, and even Samsung at one point agreed to pay royalties to Microsoft, but that is changing now. According to Microsoft, Samsung claims that with Microsoft officially taking over Nokia, they had invalidated the cross-license IP agreement meaning that they were no longer obligated to pay Microsoft anymore royalties.
Microsoft disagrees, thus the lawsuit in which a judge would then decide whether or not Samsung’s claims are valid. However Microsoft offered up another opinion in which they feel that Samsung thinks that they’re too big now to pay royalties to Microsoft.
According to Microsoft’s corporate VP, David Howard, “After spending months trying to resolve our disagreement, Samsung has made clear in a series of letters and discussions that we have a fundamental disagreement as to the meaning of our contract. Samsung predicted it would be successful, but no one imagined their Android smartphone sales would increase this much.”
Microsoft is hoping that this lawsuit won’t damage their relationship with Samsung, but they are hoping that the courts will help them settle this disagreement. What do you guys think? Will Samsung drag this out like they did with Apple, or could we look forward to a quick and clean decision?