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Court: Google did no evil in blocking use of competing location application on Android phones

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today tossed a lawsuit by Skyhook Wireless of South Boston against Google, saying the company failed to prove Google maliciously tried to keep its location services off Android phones in 2009 and 2010.

If anything, the court ruled, the fault was entirely Skyhook's, for failing to ensure its software would work properly with the application programming interfaces Google wrote for determining the location of an Android phone.

In fact, the court said, Google told one phone vendor - Motorola - it was free to install Skyhook's XPS software on its Android phones, if Skyhook could get it to work with Google's own location services, which are installed on all Android phones. When Skyhook failed to prove that was the case, the court ruled, Google was entirely within its rights, based on a contract Motorola had signed with it, to insist Motorola not ship phones with Skyhook software installed.

After the execution of the Motorola-Skyhook contract, there was considerable discussion within and between these two companies as to whether XPS was Android-compatible. This discussion was prompted by the fact that XPS was configured to report "hybrid" location data-- information derived not only from GPS satellites, but from the network data obtained using cell towers and Wi-Fi networks - through Google's GPS Provider API, which was described in Google's SDK as delivering satellite data alone. ...

With respect to the data collection issue, in order to ship their devices with the Android trademark and Google's proprietary GMS Apps, the manufacturers were contractually obliged to leave [Google's] GMS Apps fully functional. When Skyhook conditioned Motorola's use of the revised version of XPS on Motorola's removal of [Google] NLP's data collection function, Google was entitled, under its contract with Motorola, to insist upon the "accurate reproduction" of Google applications, including NLP.

Also, the court ruled Skyhook has no claim against Google under the Massachusetts consumer-protection law because

At the relevant time, Google's headquarters was in California, Motorola's headquarters was in Illinois, and Samsung's headquarters was in South Korea. All of Google's allegedly unfair or deceptive acts, including its communications, both physical and electronic, occurred outside the Commonwealth. Although Massachusetts would be the situs of any royalty revenue lost to Skyhook from the sale to Massachusetts consumers of XPS-enabled Motorola and Samsung Android devices, that factor alone does not suffice to bring this dispute within the ambit of c. 93A, particularly in light of the global marketplace for such devices.

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