Steve Jobs may not have lived to make good on his promise of a “thermonuclear” war against Google, but the company he left behind is determined to keep up the fight. In one of the biggest stories from the weekend, Rockstar Consortium, of which Apple and Microsoft are key members, caused a stir when it filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas court, alleging that Google has infringed on seven of its patents.

The story was first broken by Reuters, which reports:

“The group that owns thousands of former Nortel patents filed its first patent lawsuit on Thursday against a familiar target: Google, the company it outbid in the Nortel bankruptcy auction.”

“Rockstar, a consortium jointly owned by Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Ericsson and Sony, sued Google in a Texas federal court, accusing the internet search company of infringing seven patents. The patents cover technology that helps match search terms with relevant advertising, the lawsuit said, which is the core of Google’s search business.”

If you’re wondering who “Nortel” is, well that’d be the former Canadian telecom giant Nortel Networks, which was one of the biggest internet firms in the 1990s until the dotcom bust sent it spiraling into decline. The company clung on to life for years after, only to fold in 2009, leaving behind an invaluable patent portfolio that was put up for auction in 2011. What with the importance of mobile and patent wars just starting to become fashionable, Nortel Networks patent portfolio was seen as the equivalent of gold dust by tech firms. The bidding was led by Google, and the search giant looked to have secured its prize with a $4.4 billion bid, only to be undone by a consortium of companies including Apple, Microsoft, Ericsson , Sony, and Research In Motion – the Rockstar Consortium – which offered up $4.5 billion for the patents.

Google a victim? Hardly…

Various commentators have accused the Rockstar Consortium of trolling Google, with ARS Technica in particular taking a very one sided view in its article headlined: “Patent War Goes Nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-Owned ‘Rockstar’ Sues Google”. Moreover, a second article by Rakesh Sharma in Forbes points out that the Rockstar Consortium exists solely to protect its patents:

“According to a Wired profile last year, the company has a mix of engineers and lawyers in its staff of 32. The engineers are reverse engineers: they pick products apart to investigate for technology that infringes their patents and the lawyers are responsible for filing lawsuits against companies. Because Rockstar does not manufacture any products, they cannot be sued.”

Various prominent tweeters, including Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, have also sided with Google on this:

Apple and Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for underwriting such blatant patent troll warfare, http://t.co/PajyuNibSA – disgusting.

— DHH (@dhh) November 1, 2013

That may well be true, but Google is hardly the innocent party in this affair. One only has to look at the actions of Motorola, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, which has filed patent lawuits against Apple and others all around the world. It was only last month that Apple finally stopped an 18-month injunction against it that prevented users in Germany from getting push notifications for email – which came about due to a patent lawsuit started by Google. If anything, Google’s trolling antics are even worse than Apple’s and Microsoft’s – its FRAND patent abuses are a prime example.

The Rockstar Consortium’s lawsuit is in fact just the latest bout in an ongoing patent war between various technology companies and Google/Android. And this war doesn’t make anyone look good – Apple, Microsoft, Google – they’re all as bad as each other.

Truth is, it’s the patent system that stinks, and it’s being abused by most of the world’s biggest tech firms, whenever they think they can gain an advantage from it. But for those who’re arguing that Apple and Microsoft are in the wrong here, that’s not the whole story. After all, had Google managed to grab hold of Nortel’s patents instead of Rockstar, it’s hard to believe that given its own track record, it wouldn’t be doing exactly the same thing.