NPR analyzes the above infographic from Reuters:

There’s a legal war on in the smartphone industry. Everybody is suing everybody else for patent infringement. The patent war is a key reason Google is buying Motorola for $12.5 billion: Motorola has some 17,000 patents that will belong to Google when the deal goes through.

The key for Google is not Google itself, but rather all the hardware makers that build smartphones and tablets that run Android, Google’s mobile operating system. Those companies are the ones with green dots next to their names.

While not as saturated, the burgeoning smartphone patent war is starting look more and more like the North American video game crash of 1983: many competitors, increasingly similar products and whole bunch of lawsuits. 

With Google’s deep pockets, I am sure Android will be fine, but I am interested to see how this impacts patent