Patent infringement cases are so common these days, they’ve become the norm amongst mobile players.  The latest to make headlines is Motorola Mobility, a company in the process of being acquired by Google, and now being sued by a company Google itself invested in.

Motorola Mobility

Intellectual Ventures, the company that thrives by accumulating patents and generating money through licensing agreements with companies that use their patents, sued Motorola Mobility, accusing them of infringing six of their patents that involve technology related to file transferring, updating and remote data management.

In a post on IV’s site, Chief Litigation Counsel Melissa Finocchio provided the following statement:

“Intellectual Ventures has successfully signed licensing agreements with many of the top handset manufacturers in the world, and has been in discussions with Motorola Mobility for some time.  Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach agreement on a license. We have a responsibility to our current customers and our investors to defend our intellectual property rights against companies such as Motorola Mobility who use them without a license. Our goal continues to be to provide companies with access to our portfolio through licensing and sales, but we will not tolerate ongoing infringement of our patents to the detriment of our current customers and our business.”

IV was founded in 2000 by Microsoft’s former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.  Since then, the firm raised over $5 billion and amassed a portfolio of more than 35,000 patents.  Back in May, IV legally disclosed that Google is one of the companies that have financial interest in the firm.

Since Google publicly announced their $12.5 billion bid for Motorola, IV’s lawsuit against Motorola signifies that Google cannot protect their Android partners from legal troubles, and the acquisition is more for Google’s benefit and not so much for Motorola.

Patent expert Florian Mueller said Google’s backing of Intellectual Ventures was an “own goal” and said that its failure to defend Android partners was “inexcusable.”

Oracle

But Google’s not the only one with courtroom tales.  In 1998, Oracle agreed to sell their software to government customers at discounts of up to 40% off the list price.   The government was lead to believe that the discounts they were given were bigger than the ones Oracle gave similar-sized business.  But they soon found out that more than 90% of businesses received discounts larger than what Oracle gave to the government.

In 2007, a year after the deal ended, a lawsuit was filed against Oracle when Paul Frascella, a former Oracle employee, raised the initial allegations in a suit against the company under the False Claims Act, which provides financial rewards to private litigants who report alleged fraud against the government.  The lawsuit was kept under wraps until 2010 when the government decided to join the lawsuit.

At present, Oracle agreed to pay $199.5 million, plus interest, to settle the fraud charges filed by the US government.  Oracle strongly believes that they did not do anything wrong–they are willing to settle to avoid wasting time and money in pursuing the case.

“Oracle vigorously denies that it did not scrupulously adhere to the pricing requirements of that contract.  Oracle never committed any fraud whatsoever,” a spokeswoman for Oracle said in a statement on Thursday. The company settled “to avoid the distraction and high cost of litigating this case,” the statement added.

Frascella will be awarded $40 million as his share for the settlement.  At present, the settlement is the largest False Claims Act deal obtained by the General Services Administration.