Barnes & Noble has accused Microsoft of abusing patent lawsuits to prevent manufacturers from using the Android operating system.

In March, Microsoft sued Barnes & Noble for allegedly infringing on six patents in its Android-based Nook e-reader. Nook manufacturers Foxconn and Inventec were also sued.

Specifically, Microsoft is accusing the Nook of infringing on: ways to navigate through information provided by device apps via a separate control window with tabs; display of a webpage's content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster; allowing apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content; permitting users to select text in a document and adjust that selection; and providing users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document. Microsoft offered to license Barnes & Noble these patents.

In a response (PDF) filed last week, Barnes & Noble lashed out at Microsoft, accusing the company of "misusing these patents as part of a scheme to try to eliminate competition to its own Windows Phone 7 mobile device operating system posed by the open source Android operating system and other open source operating systems."

Barnes & Noble also described a rather odd first meeting with Microsoft in July 2010. At the meeting, the retailer said Microsoft waved around a few "detailed claim charts" that it said proved that Barnes & Noble was infringing on the six patents. But the software giant refused to share the charts with Barnes & Noble unless the latter signed a non-disclosure agreement; Barnes & Noble refused.

At the end of the response, Barnes & Noble requested a jury trial at the federal level.

At his FOSS blog, "intellectual property activist" Florien Mueller found Barnes & Noble's argument rather thin. "The broad accusations that Barnes & Noble makes aren't supported by evidence," he wrote.

"I'm personally against any anticompetitive abuse of patents. If the way a company uses its patents crosses the line between reasonable monetization efforts and the destruction of legitimate competition, it has to be stopped," he wrote. "But if companies cry foul over allegedly anticompetitive conduct even though a reasonable license deal is proposed, it only becomes harder to make the case when there really is a need to present a competition argument."

Microsoft has reached licensing deals with several Android manufacturers, including HTC and Amazon for its Kindle e-reader. Motorola has been holding out since October.

Meanwhile, Apple has also sued its share of Android manufacturers for allegedly infringing on iPhone and iOS patents, including Samsung, HTC, and Motorola. Again over at the FOSS blog, Mueller explains why Google is "patently too weak to protect Android." After all, it's open and free to use.

As a result: "It's quite possible that even some device makers who adopted Android overrated Google's ability to defend Android against patent threats," he wrote. "Google probably doesn't have any contractual obligations. It puts out Android on open source terms. If things work out well, Google reaps most of the rewards. If things go wrong, others bear the brunt of the patent litigation (only three of the twelve suits I listed name Google among the defendants)."

Source:pcmag.com