Apparently, Apple isn’t try to sue the heart of Google’s business. You see, last month, Rockstar — a consortium of companies including Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, and Sony that purchased 6,000 patents from Nortel in 2011 — sued Google, among others, for infringing six patents. Not just any patents, but ones that covered “an advertisement machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network,” which is pretty much Google’s entire business.
To many, this move looked like Apple was escalating Steve Jobs’s “thermonuclear war” against Android. Apple was also accused of acting like a patent troll, and Google was criticized for not taking the Nortel patents as seriously it should have when it bid $3.14159 billion on them in a losing effort.
However, Rockstar CEO John Veschi disputes the idea that Apple was pulling the strings. In an interview with Intellectual Asset Management, Veschi described the suit as an independently made business decision. He said, “It was entirely my call based on the facts in front of me. The shareholders got an email telling them what had happened after the suits were issued.”
Veschi has been in charge of these patents since 2008, first as Nortel’s IP chief and then as CEO of Rockstar since 2011. He says Rockstar was not influenced by Apple or any other shareholder.
“I understand that it might be sexy to say that they are pulling the strings, but actually it is also slightly insulting to us,” he said. “We are running the business. We do that job and they do their jobs and that’s it.”
