>>"The patents can't be that solid and defensible. Note that when challenged on the Nook (which runs Android), Barnes and Noble came up with 20 pages of prior art, which led to them getting a nice deal from MS to shut them up."
This "nice deal" involved Barnes and Noble selling a very sizeable chunk (about a fifth) of their ebook / Nook business to Microsoft who was very keen to get an In to the sector at the time. It's also odd that you think a company B&N could easily come up with ways to shoot down the patents and get MS to back off but a company thirty times their size in total assets and over a hundred times the annual NET income of B&N (Samsung) would just roll over and comply. You haven't thought this through at all.
We don't even know that all of the same patents were involved! And the costs between the two companies are not at all comparable. "Twenty pages" that were never tested in court? A lawyer I saw produced more than that for a minor action I was involved with. It's meaningless without specifics. That could have been twenty pages of worthless drawings for all that we know. All that we do know is that B&N sold a large slice of a valuable and growing business to MS in response to the licence request.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
