Google strikes back at BT with patent suit, but mediation looms

Google has sued BT, the British telecoms giant, in both the U.S. and the U.K. over alleged patent infringement, but the facts behind this and other disagreements between the two firms remain murky.

The patents in the U.S. suit (CNET has located a copy of the court documents) mostly originated from IBM – two cover the reservation of system resources for assuring quality of service, and one deals with assigning connection capacity in a multi-tiered data-processing network. A fourth patent, which was originally obtained by Fujitsu, also covers a “gateway for internet telephone”.

All pretty broad and, according to Google, infringed by BT’s wholesale quality of service products and OneVoice unified communications system. Google is asking the U.S. courts to order BT to stop infringing and to pay Google damages.

The British suit is somewhat more mysterious. While some reports overnight suggested that BT had not yet been served with that suit, the company told me this morning that this has indeed happened. Beyond that, it refused to comment on the specifics of the suit. It’s worth reminding ourselves here that the British patent system is quite different from that of the U.S. – it is far trickier there to patent “business methods” — so it would be a mistake to assume a direct correlation between the two cases.

However, I did get some interesting information from a source within BT: firstly, that the company sees this as “predictable” retaliation for BT’s lawsuit against Google (filed more than a year ago), but also that that 2011 case is going to mediation this coming July. In my own analysis, this makes it possible that Google’s suit against BT is intended as leverage for that meeting.

Google itself has said in a statement that it “always [sees] litigation as a last resort” and is defending itself against both the 2011 suit and BT’s “arming [of] patent trolls” – a clear reference to Steelhead’s January lawsuit against Google (and half the tech industry) using patents it had bought from BT.

However, BT has always maintained that it has “no involvement” with the Steelhead suit, telling me last month that it sold all the rights to the relevant patents last year and would receive no share of Steelhead’s licensing income. Someone is misrepresenting the facts here, and it may be a while before we find out who that is – if indeed we ever do.