• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 4, 2011

Patents have become the gold built into handsets and devices that set one company apart from another, especially when it comes to search and mobile. It's become so important that Google hired Suzanne Michel, one of the Federal Trade Commission's top intellectual property patent lawyers and main contributor to a report issued earlier this year discussing the evolution of managing intellectual property.

"Any smartphone that's certified to talk with the Verizon or the AT&T network must include essential patents," according to an industry analysts who asked for anonymity. "The piece that allows the phone to communicate requires thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of patents."

Then earlier this week, Google used its Official Blog to publicly call out an "organized campaign" against Android brought on by Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and other companies that have banded together to acquire Novell Networks' old patents.

It turns out that 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices on average during the three months ending June 2011, according to comScore. A study conducted by the data company surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers, and found Samsung took the No. 1 handset manufacturer spot with 25.3% market share. Google Android continued to gain ground in the smartphone market, reaching 40.1% market share in June -- up 5.4 percentage points.

Smartphone adoption in the U.S. rose 8% to 78.5 million people for the three months ending June 2011, according to comScore. Apple strengthened its No. 2 position with 26.6% of the smartphone market, up 1.1 percentage points from the prior reporting period. RIM ranked third with 23.4% share, followed by Microsoft at 5.8% and Symbian at 2.0%.

Google licenses the mobile Android operating system for free to handset makers such as Samsung, but it appears that Microsoft has demanded the electronics maker that builds the OS into handsets pay $15 for each device it makes based on Google's OS. The fee makes it more expensive for companies to do business.

Ironically, David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer, called out the competitors by name. He wrote in a blog post that it would become more expensive to license Android than Windows Phone 7. Microsoft also has been cited filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. "Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it," he wrote, asserting that the companies are "fighting through litigation" rather than compete by building new features or devices.

Meanwhile, Oracle apparently wants to compete in other sectors in addition to mobile patents. The United States Patent and Trademark Office in June granted Oracle a patent for "a flexible and extensible architecture," providing a "simple Internet-like search experience to users searching secure content inside (and outside) the enterprise." The patent, titled "Re-ranking search results from an enterprise system," claims to provide a method of improving ranking results for a data query.