How much Microsoft patents are really worth?

How much Microsoft patents are really worth?

Here's a small list of "features" that you'll find in any smartphone:

1. Activating the phone using a pin
2. Making emergency calls
3. Search engine integration
4. Making voice commands
5. Navigating the web
6. Writing emails
7. Geolocation (maps/satelite/navigation)
8. Buying things in a marketplace
9. Talking to friends via instant messager
10. Alarm clock
11. Calendar
12. Calculator
13. Taking photos
14. Reading news
15. Taking notes
16. Reading/editing texts
17. Recording sounds
18. Playing video
19. Playing music
20. Managing contacts
21. Making phone calls

etc.

All these ideas sound trivial? But each of them is covered by a number of patents. In fact, a typical smartphone is covered by 250,000 patents (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/technology/a-bull-market-in-tech-patents.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all). If manufacturers paid $0.01 for each patent, smartphones would cost $2,500 -- and that wouldn't even include the manufacturing costs!

Thus, I think we can agree that patents *cannot* cost $0.01. At least the simplest ones.

Now, let's take look at the patents that Microsoft is using to get money from Barnes & Noble and other Android phone makers:

Patent #6,957,233: Making annotations in read-only documents

Patent #6,891,551: Highlighting and selecting elements of electronic documents

Patent #5,778,372: Quickly downloading documents from a browser

Read that again.

Microsoft thinks that making anotations in a read-only document (which implies saving the anotations in a separate file) or highliting and selecting elements from a document (which is done since the first text editors, 25 years ago) and downloading *documents* are so important features that Android manufactorers should pay a few bucks for each smartphone sold.

Remember: if manufacturers paid $0.01 for each trivial patent, smartphones would cost $2,500. That's simply impossible!

What would be a fair value of trivial and unimportant patents like these?

So... let's consider that the price of a smartphone is $800. If companies are supposed to pay, directly or indirectly, for each one of the 250,000 patents, the price for each one would be $0.0032. Let's make it $0.01 per license. (Microsoft deserves that.)

That would give Microsoft $0.03 per device sold. Is that fair?

Let's see: Android manufacturers are expected to sell 180 million devices per year, that three patents would give Microsoft a whooping $5.4 million per year.

That's enough to hire a team of 54 engineers. Do you think 54 engineers could possibly come up with more inovative ideas like "Making annotations in read-only documents", "Highlighting and selecting elements of electronic documents", and "Quickly downloading documents from a browser"?

Sounds like a good deal, unless Microsoft wants to use their patents in anticompetitive ways.