[wtallis]

It's not about whether Google is good or bad, or doing good or bad things.

In the US, patents are allowed for the sole purpose of encouraging innovation. In the case of Android, Google's work is in danger of being halted, and in a way that does not clearly make it easier for their competitors to innovate more with less competition. Thus, the software patents being used against Google are likely to have the opposite of their intended effect, unless Google can force a stalemate by gathering their own patent war chest.

If we didn't have all these software patents, all the money going to litigation could be invested in the real business of making products, which would be a net win as long as there are market forces spurring innovation.

(Another way of looking at it is that software is cheap enough to develop that companies don't need decades of market exclusivity to recoup their costs. The fundamental computer science R&D needed for a cell phone software platform is negligible compared to the QA costs of making it production-ready, and those QA costs are already well-protected by copyright.)