Could Google’s Motorola Acquisition Ease Its Patent Woes?

The phrase “protect the Android ecosystem” was one Google and Motorola executives bounced around frequently while discussingGoogle’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility on a call with journalists and investors Monday morning.

Google’s Android operating system is a relatively new player in the mobile space. It’s put Google behind in the patent game and left the company open to what Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond recently referred to as “a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.”

In contrast, Motorola was founded 80 years ago and was the first company to put a mobile phone on the market. It holds 17,000 issued patents worldwide and has another 7,500 patents in progress. But that hasn’t left the company immune to patent lawsuits — it’s been engaged in a legal battle with Microsoft since October — but it does have a better patent defense than Google on its own.

“While we’re not prepared to talk specific strategy, we think that Motorola having that kind of a patent portfolio … to protect the Android ecosystem is a good thing,” Drummond said on the call.

Google has good reason to be mounting a defense of Android. Other technology companies have already attempted to charge patent-based royalty fees to manufacturers that use the platform like Barnes and Noble,HTC and Samsung. These fees could pile up to a point where installing Android, a free operating system, is more expensive than making another choice.

Most recently in Google’s patent wars, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants beat out Google and its $900 million bid for patents from the bankrupt Nortel that could threaten the Android operating system. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the deal was intended to hamper Android. In another case involving Novell patents, the department required Microsoft to sell its patents, and it required the purchasers of the other patents to give a license to the open-source community.

Shortly after the Nortel kerfuffle, Microsoft asked Samsung to pay a $15 royalty fee for every phone that it makes that uses the Android platform.

Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said the portfolio has “tremendous strength” in wireless standards. Google seems to have brought a ringer into the patent arena, but whether that will change the game in a way worth its $12.5 billion price tag is still to be played out.