Apple, Microsoft and others form Rockstar sue Google and Android manufacturers

Rockstar Reverse Engineering Laboratory

In 2011, the Rockstar Bidco consortium, formed by Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Sony, and Ericsson, purchased over 6,000 patents from Nortel Networks for $4.5 billion. Now, Rockstar has officially launched its nuclear weapon, filing a lawsuit against Google and major Android manufacturers Asus, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung, and ZTE in the Eastern District Court of Texas.

Rockstar accuses Google of infringing on six of its patents, all of which are related to associative search engines. One of these patents was filed as early as 1997, before Google was even founded. It also accuses Android manufacturers of infringing on seven additional patents, one of which pertains to graphical user interfaces for navigation tools. The products accused of infringement include smartphones and tablets. For example, in the case of Huawei, the lawsuit claims that the infringing products include Huawei M865 MUVE, Ascend II, and Premia 4G M931 phones, as well as Huawei tablet families such as MediaPad and IDEOS S7 Slim, among others.