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A ruling was finally given today over the on-going legal battles between Microsoft and the now Google-owned Motorola, with the judge declaring that the worth of Motorola's patents are worth far less than Motorola seemed to think they were - $3.82 billion a year less, in fact. 

Microsoft and Motorola have had their horns locked in legal battles over Microsoft's use of several of Motorola's patents that are part of 802.11 Wi-Fi and H.264 video standards. The patents have been deemed as standards-essential patents, which mean that they have to be licensed to others at a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) rate. 

Microsoft's attorneys claimed that Motorola violated the RAND pact by asking for too much to use the patents - a massive 2.25 percent of the price of Microsoft products that were sold using the patents, including all Windows 7 computers and the Xbox 360. 

The new ruling now places the RAND rate for Motorola's H.264 patent at 0.555 cents for each end product with a reasonable range stretching up to 16.839 cents per product sold. For the 802.11 Wi-Fi patents, the court ruled that 3.471 cents per unit was to be the rate for Xbox products and 0.8 cents per unit for any other products. 

The new figures place a massive drop in value on the portfolio with the court stating that the new royalty rate would be just $1,797,554 - a significant drop from $4 billion a year. 

If you want to check out all the legal documents, they're available here. 

Source: AllThingsD | Image via Microsoft

google can eat shit and die for all i care.

at least the judge is trying to be fair about it, all i know now is that ive bought my last android phone. i already started moving off gmail.

Most excelent.. If google had it their way every company would go ask more for the RAND rates.. we would be buying tech products at 10x the price..

Outlook.com was the nail in the coffin for my Google account(gmail) the only reason I have it right now is to access Play store and my Youtube account. If only youtube was independent that would have been great.

I can't even think about how Google(Motorola) came up with a 4b$ proposition on FRAND patents, it simply does not make any sense

I'm sure Google has to be pretty salty about this. That's a big difference from what they were asking for!

Google is getting it's ass kicked in court right now.
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Blaming Google for this is asinine.

This is between Motorola and MS..from 2010...before Google had anything to do with Motorola.

That said, this seems like justice. Industry standards should be cheap, otherwise why use them?

Florian Mueller (the FOSS patents blogger) likes to continually point out that since May 2012, the Google-Motorola deal has been finalized and all legal action taken by Motorola must be approved by Google.  Google publically stated that one purpose of buying Motorola was to defend Android with their patents, so it's not like they are just "looking the other way" on this.  Anyone who thinks what Motorola is doing is evil should realize that their behaviour is formally condoned by Google.  This particular lawsuit might be an old leftover (I don't know the details), but Motorola has filed other standards-essential suits since the acquisition, and it seems fair to attribute those fully to Google.

And let's not forget that this legal action is in response to Microsoft suing Motorola over it's use of Android.  Microsoft swung first!

I dont' use gmail for YouTube, but then my account is a legacy account.