Microsoft Earns a Patent Licensing Victory Over Google

Earlier this week, a federal appeals court handed Microsoft a victory against Google in a long-running lawsuit over patent licensing that dated back to a 2010 complaint filed against Motorola. The dispute began when Motorola sent a letter to Microsoft asking it to pay $4B per year to license patents covering the 802.11 standard that underpins Wi-Fi and the H.264 video encoding standard.  A panel of three judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower court ruling that set a licensing rate that was significantly lower than what Motorola had asked for.