Tech companies have recently ratcheted up their offensive use of intellectual property, especially in the mobile space — but not so much in social networking.

Just in case patent wars happen to be contagious, it seems worth evaluating which social networking players are best-equipped.

I wrote on Wednesday about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is hopeful that Google may pursue some of the patents and patent applications he filed on behalf of a company he started that Google later acquired.

Also on Wednesday, on the occasion of Facebook filing to go public, two patent researchers from Envision IP posted a good summary of the distribution of social networking patents among tech companies.

Here’s a breakdown:

Facebook: Facebook told prospective investors that it has “56 issued patents and 503 filed patent applications in the United States and 33 corresponding patents and 149 filed patent applications in foreign countries relating to social networking, web technologies and infrastructure, and related technologies.”

(Here’s a list of some of the granted patents, direct from the USPTO.)

This Facebook news feed patent lists Mark Zuckerberg as the first inventor.

Facebook’s patents cover inventions created at the company, like its news feed and some privacy features, as well as some additional intellectual property it acquired.

The biggest patent acquisition deal Facebook has done was with MOL Global, for the Friendster patent portfolio of seven patents and 11 patent applications in May 2010. That cost $40 million — something insiders considered a steal, given the risk of the patents falling into someone else’s hands.

The Friendster patents cover topics like making connections on a social network, friend-of-a-friend connections through a social graph, and social media sharing.

At Facebook’s most recent internal valuation, the stock alone spent on the Friendster patent deal is now worth more than $100 million.

(Personal side note: The Friendster patents are something I’ve now written about for years. I broke the news, for Red Herring, on Friendster being awarded a patent on social networking in 2006, then reported on Facebook acquiring them at GigaOM.)

Google: Though Google hasn’t been a major social networking provider for all that long, it has 25 U.S. patents and 40 pending U.S. patent applications on the topic, by Envision IP’s count.

Google has aggressively hunted intellectual property about social networking. As I referenced earlier, it got a patent portfolio through its acquisition of the Dealmap (previously Fatdoor). That includes patents and patent applications on things like regions of influence within users of a network.

Image from the core Dodgeball patent

Last year, Google also acquired some patents from the shut-down social search engine Wowd, including one on user-driven ranking of Web pages. In an interesting twist that resulted from a three-way split of Wowd’s assets, Google currently licenses those patents to Facebook. Backstory here.

Back in 2005, Google also bought Dodgeball, the mobile social application created by Dennis Crowley, which predated Foursquare. And it turns out that because of Dodgeball, Google is assigned what looks to be a broadly worded patent on “location-based software for mobile devices” that describes messaging between two users who are in close physical proximity to each other.

The Six Degrees patent: Back in 2003, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus paid $700,000 in an auction for a seminal patent from the failed social network Six Degrees, in part to keep it away from Friendster’s control. Hoffman recently told me that he and Pincus bought the patent as individuals, and then assigned it to their companies, LinkedIn and Tribe.net.

Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM: Envision IP notes that Apple has 35 U.S. patents and 76 U.S. patent applications that seem to be about social networking and collaboration, many of them focused on mobile. Yahoo has an armory of patents on all sorts of general Web technologies, while Microsoft and IBM have about 80 patents on file sharing, messaging and infrastructure that could be used for social networks.

LinkedIn and Twitter: LinkedIn has one patent, on evaluating user reputations within a social network. Twitter doesn’t seem to have applied for a single patent (at least, not prior to 18 months ago, since that’s the period after which patent applications are published).

What are the other pockets of social networking intellectual property out there, at other companies and around the world? I’m sure I’ve missed some, so please add to this list in the comments.

Evidently, Google has no trouble with that percentage at all.

In a letter to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) today, Google said that should it complete its proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility, it will license the company’s standard-essential patents under “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” terms (FRAND). To that end, it will honor Motorola Mobility’s existing essential patent licensing commitments and grant new ones going forward with “a maximum per-unit royalty of 2.25 percent.”

Now that might not sound like an untoward sum, but applied against a device’s selling price, it’s sizable. A rate of 2.25 percent on 2011 iPhone sales, for example, would have amounted to about $1 billion in potential royalties for Motorola.

That doesn’t seem fair or reasonable. More to the point, it runs contrary to the principles of FRAND licensing commitments, and bolsters arguments recently made by both Apple and Microsoft that the mobile industry really needs a consistent patent-licensing scheme.

“It’s a prohibitive royalty rate as long as they want to apply it against the selling price of what they call the ‘relevant end product,’” says FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller. “If they asked for 2.25 percent of the price of a baseband chip, they would at least propose a reasonable royalty base and one could then talk about how many patents go into such a chip and what the relative value of their patents is. But 2.25 percent of the selling price of the product as a whole is absolutely out of step with the concept of FRAND and with industry practice.”

However, antitrust enforcers in the U.S. and Europe remain concerned about Google’s commitment to license key Motorola patents to competitors on fair terms, those people said, and are likely to closely monitor Google’s use of the patents. The European Commission has set a deadline of Monday to decide whether to approve the acquisition.

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In a letter filed in a California court last month, a lawyer said Motorola, which is being acquired by Google Inc., had “demanded” the royalty for a license of its patents.

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The Munich I Regional Court on Wednesday evening denied Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Nexus, Samsung’s flagship Android smartphone, and its Galaxy Tab 10.1N, a newer version of the tablet intended to further differentiate it from Apple’s iPad, keeping it immune from litigation.

That differentiation didn’t much come into play in this ruling, though.

At issue in this case was a touchscreen-related patent that Munich Regional Court Judge Andreas Mueller evidently felt wouldn’t stand up. Said Mueller, “Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection.”

So, two patent spats resolved — for the time being. But the broader intellectual property battle between Apple and Samsung continues to rage on in various courts around the world.

The case hinges on standards-essential patents, patents which cover an area that is crucial to compliance with an industry standard, such as 3G or Wi-Fi.

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First, a German court handed the South Korean company a setback, rejecting one of the seven patent infringement claims it had brought against Apple. In the court’s view, Samsung’s claim that Apple violates this particular patent, which relates to 3G/UMTS wireless standard, isn’t valid, though the presiding judge hasn’t yet explained why that’s the case.

Far more interesting is this second bit of news coming out of the German courts today. Evidently, Apple has decided to assert its slide-to-unlock patent against Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus. This is the first time Apple has fingered the Nexus as an infringing device, and its decision to do so appears to be a significant escalation of the company’s campaign against Android. Not only is the Galaxy Nexus one of Samsung’s hero smartphones, it’s also Google’s Android 4.0 reference device.

In fact, it’s the only smartphone shipping with Android 4.0 right now. In other words, it’s the latest “pure Google” phone. Which is noteworthy.

“Judging by the first three weeks of 2012, Apple’s intellectual property assertions against Android continue to escalate,” patent analyst Florian Mueller told AllThingsD. “Samsung appears to be no less determined to fight. Apple’s supplemental infringement contentions targeting the Android 4.0 lead device are an unequivocal signal to Google that Apple doesn’t shy away from a frontal assault.”

The new executive would report to the board and could have broad powers to manage Kodak’s finances and operations.

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The company’s in no hurry to resolve its legal claims against Android smartphone vendors like Samsung, HTC and Motorola, says Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore. Instead, it’s likely holding out for a big payoff.

Which is a wise move, because in doing so Apple is undermining Android in a number of ways. The threat of litigation is obviously a deterrent — or at the very least, a consideration — to any handset manufacturer mulling Android as a potential OS for its devices. And for those OEM’s that have already been sued, it significantly raises the cost of supporting Android.

So realistically, expediency isn’t the game here. The longer these cases drag on, the better it is for Apple, especially if the company ends up prevailing in the end. Whitmore seems to believe it’s the likely outcome and figures Apple could end up collecting a fee of $10 for every Android device sold, which would add about $35 to its share price. And though less likely, if it wins outright and convinces a court to ban some Android handsets, the upside is even greater, as you can see in the chart below.

“Although Apple has not expressed a desire to settle, most believe a settlement could occur resulting in a $10-per-unit software licensing fee,” Whitmore says. “… Beyond the monetary benefit to Apple, a settlement would make Android-based handsets incrementally more expensive and less competitive due to the higher OS cost and would likely support incremental iOS share gains vs. Android. … Given the upside potential associated with an outright win, we don’t expect Apple to settle anytime soon.”

Over at FOSS Patents, Florian Mueller takes issue with Whitmore’s $35-per-share figure.

The struggling photography icon, which employs about 19,000 people, is in discussions with potential lenders for around $1 billion in so-called debtor-in possession financing that would keep it afloat during bankruptcy proceedings, the people said. A filing could occur as soon as this month or early February, one of the people said.

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TiVo shares initially leaped 15 percent to $10.27 after hours Tuesday, while AT&T rose 6 cents to $30.44.

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Public records now show the buyer was Google.

So yes, indeed, there is a body of social search intellectual property — around things like user-driven ranking of Web pages and a distributed file system — that three companies have the rights to use: Google, Facebook and the virtually unknown start-up Jildy.

Last week Jildy released its very first product: An iPhone app for clustering and sorting Facebook friends and status updates.

It’s kind of similar to Katango, a friend-sorting app that Google recently bought for an undisclosed sum.

The Jildy interface is rudimentary and so far only includes Facebook data, but it already provides some interesting tools to those who want to slice and dice their social streams.

Jildy gives users tools to monitor four types of lists:

1. keyword-based searches of their friends’ status messages that they can set up manually
2. algorithmically created lists of friends who are friends with each other (this is like what Katango did, but Jildy users can both read and write to the lists of people)
3. demographically created lists, like male friends and female friends, or San Francisco friends and New York friends
4. any lists that users have already created on Facebook

Then, Jildy tries to find out the top five to seven people or topics within each of those lists, so a user can quickly dive in and see what’s happened recently.

In the next couple of weeks, Jildy plans to add notifications. So for instance, said Jildy’s Mark Drummond (the co-founder and former CEO of Wowd), a user could be alerted every time a friend mentions a term like “skiing,” “snowboarding” or “Tahoe,” the better to facilitate serendipitous meet-ups on the slopes.

Other upcoming additions should include Twitter and LinkedIn data. Drummond said he also thinks it’s important to help users edit their friend lists to stay updated as social circles change.

On a larger note, the patent wars that plague the mobile device industry haven’t crept into social networking yet, aside from a few defensive buys throughout the years, like the Friendster portfolio (now owned by Facebook) and the Six Degrees patent (bought by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Zynga’s Mark Pincus, when Pincus was at Tribe.net).

But all the interest in the Wowd patent portfolio — which, to be clear, has not yet been used to build a successful social search product — shows that giants like Facebook and Google are attentively shoring up access to intellectual property in case social patent wars do break out.

It’s kind of ironic (and maybe even a good thing, if you don’t like software patents) that the two rivals have rights to use the very same technology from the same defunct start-up.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jildy has seven employees and $650,000 from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and KPG Ventures. To be specific, it has non-exclusive licenses to three awarded patents and six patent applications from Wowd, and owns three more Wowd patents. Drummond said Wowd is in the process of becoming a liquidating trust.

Photo of Mark Drummond by James Duncan Davidson for the Web 2.0 Summit 2009, where Wowd was first announced.

Groklaw reported the notifications on Friday. See the full filing here. These patent reexaminations are a routine part of patent lawsuits. One party, usually the one that’s alleged to be infringing, asks the patent office to reexamine the patent and decide whether or not the patent should have been issued in the first place. A rejection isn’t by any means a final nail in the coffin in Oracle’s infringement case against Google. But it doesn’t exactly help Oracle, either.

Oracle has six months to appeal the patent office’s finding, and it can also, as a final step, sue the patent office itself. But these things rarely go that far.

And these rejections are sometimes meaningless to the final outcome of a lawsuit. In 2005, as part of its epic patent litigation against NTP — the case that nearly barred the import of BlackBerry devices into the United States — Research In Motion won several rejections from the patent office, like this one, which I wrote about at the time, only to suffer later defeats in court that led it to pay a $612 million settlement.

Oracle has claimed that Google owes it more than $6 billion for parts of its Java software that were used in the Android mobile operating system; Oracle took over Java after it acquired Sun Microsystems last year. Google has argued that Oracle’s claims for damages are flawed. After face-to-face talks between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page failed in September, the trial had been expected to begin in October. But it was delayed, and is now expected to get underway in 2012.

“We are pleased with the ITC’s initial determination finding Motorola violated four claims of a Microsoft patent,” Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard said in a statement. “As Samsung, HTC, Acer and other companies have recognized, respecting others’ intellectual property through licensing is the right path forward.”

Tuesday’s ruling by an administrative law judge is one step in the process. The trade commission itself will now review the finding and issue a final ruling, at which time it will decide whether to ban the import of any Motorola products.

The ruling follows a separate decision on Monday by the commission that certain HTC phones infringe on an Apple patent. In that decision, a final ruling by the commission (though still subject to court appeal) ordered that HTC products using the infringing technology be banned for import, as of April. HTC has said it plans to drop the feature in dispute.

Both cases are among a growing docket of patent disputes involving much of the mobile industry. A key issue for the industry is whether Google’s freely available Android operating system infringes on patents held by Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and others.

Update: In an interview, Motorola General Counsel Scott Offer said the company is pleased with Tuesday’s ruling.

“We view it as a huge win for us,” Offer told AllThingsD. “They had, originally, nine patents in their first case. They are down to one patent, effectively.”

As to that one patent, Offer said that it relates to how mobile devices process meeting requests via email.

“We are reviewing our options on that,” he said.

Tuesday’s decision now goes before the full commission, which typically issues its ruling within two months, though that can be extended, as was the case with Apple and HTC.

For now, Offer said, Motorola wants to keep the focus on its products rather than the court battle.

“We feel we’ve got great products and we are focused on our product portfolio.”

Speech technology company Nuance, which has been suing Vlingo, said on Tuesday that it is buying the mobile voice-software firm for an undisclosed price.

Of course, now the two firms have nothing but nice things to say about each other.

“Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding,” Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan said in a statement. “As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers.”

It wasn’t that long ago that Nuance was asserting that Vlingo’s vision was a little too similar. In August, a jury in one case found that Vlingo did not infringe on Nuance patents. However, Nuance noted at the time that it had other pending actions against Vlingo that it planned to continue pursuing.

Apparently, Apple’s introduction of Siri has convinced the two firms there are bigger fish to fry.

“Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,” Nuance mobile unit head Mike Thompson said in a statement.

Bygones.

First, the commission tossed out a second finding of patent infringement by the Taiwanese cellphone maker, and narrowed its ruling on the patent on which it did find infringement.

Second, it stayed its ruling for a longer-than-standard 120 days to give carriers time to prepare, a move that also gives HTC more time to implement and gain approval for any workarounds. The import ban would not go into effect until April, the ITC said as part of its ruling.

In a posting on his FOSS Patents blog, Florian Mueller noted that the patent in question is limited to HTC’s Android phones which use one of two claims on a patent, related to the way that phones highlight certain text within an email or other unstructured data — allowing, say, a phone number to be dialed.

“The import ban won’t relate to HTC Android products that don’t implement that feature, or that implement it in ways not covered by those patent claims,” Mueller wrote. “If Google can implement this popular feature, which users of modern-day smartphones really expect, without infringing on the two patent claims found infringed, this import ban won’t have any effect whatsoever. Otherwise HTC will have to remove this feature, which would put HTC at a competitive disadvantage as compared to other smartphone makers, including other Android device makers.”

HTC said in a statement to AllThingsD that it is confident in the options it has at its disposal.

“While disappointed that a finding of violation was still found on two claims of the ’647 patent, we are well prepared for this decision, and our designers have created alternate solutions for the ’647 patent,” HTC said. (Update: HTC said late Monday that the feature in question “is a small UI experience and HTC will completely remove it from all of our phones soon.”)

White & Case attorney Bijal Vakil said he sees Monday’s ruling as just one step in a very long litigation process around how patents play into the smartphone business.

“I don’t see today’s ruling as a game changer,” said Vakil, a partner in White & Case’s Silicon Valley office. He added that one or both parties can appeal the case to a federal court, and that HTC could also seek a further stay of the ruling, pending that appeal.

Also of note, of course, is the fact that the patent in question relates to how Android works; so, while the ruling is limited to HTC devices, the case is being closely watched by others, including key Android device makers and Google itself.

Nor is this the only case. Microsoft is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble over Android-related claims, while Oracle is suing Google directly, to name just a few of the current cases on the docket.

“Because the market for these devices is increasing, I don’t see this trend ending anytime soon,” Vakil said.

However, sorting out these claims could be very time-consuming for the courts and the companies.

“The average smartphone could potential read on tens of thousands of patents,” Vakil said. If companies were to try to review all of the possible patent implications of a product, nothing would come to market.

The organization found that HTC devices infringed on two claims related to an Apple patent. However, the ban will not take effect until April, the ITC said in a ruling, giving time for carriers to make transition plans and for HTC to demonstrate ways it has avoided infringement (by working around the patent, dropping infringing features or other means).

“Notice is hereby given that the U.S. International Trade Commission has found a violation of section 337 in this investigation and has issued a limited exclusion order prohibiting importation of infringing personal data and mobile communications devices and related software,” the agency said. “The Commission has determined that exclusion of articles subject to this order shall commence on April 19, 2012.”

HTC will be able to import some refurbished products to satisfy repair claims on already sold products, but will not be able to bring new products into the country after April 19, unless the ruling is reversed or it can show its products no longer infringe the patent in question.

The ruling had been delayed several times.

HTC said in a statement that it was pleased the commission reversed a ruling that said HTC infringed on another of Apple’s patents, and that it narrowed the ruling on the patent in which it did find infringement.

“While disappointed that a finding of violation was still found on two claims of the ’647 patent, we are well prepared for this decision, and our designers have created alternate solutions for the ’647 patent,” HTC said.

Apple didn’t comment directly on Monday’s ruling, instead merely reiterating a past statement that “we think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Here’s the ruling:

Usitc Ruling Apple Htc

The company characterized the request as routine and shrugged off the notion the deal could be blocked.

“We’re confident the Commission will conclude that this acquisition is good for competition and we’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review,” Google said in a statement to AllThingsD.

Motorola shareholders have already approved selling to Google, though the transaction awaits antitrust approvals in the United States, EU and elsewhere.

The International Trade Commission in Washington on Wednesday is expected to rule on whether some phones made by HTC Corp. violate Apple’s patents. The ruling could lead to a ban on handsets sold by the Taiwanese company, which uses the Android operating system and is the No. 3 smartphone provider in the U.S. market, according to research firm Nielsen.

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It’s a definite win for Motorola, particularly if Apple is unable to secure a stay of the injunction during appeal. That said, it may not be quite as bad for Cupertino as it seems. It’s certainly not going to keep the company’s iOS devices out of the single largest market in the EU over the holidays.

Why? Even if Motorola decides to bear the risk of enforcing a ruling that might be overturned later, the injunction applies to the importation of new iOS device shipments. It doesn’t apply to existing inventory. And sources say Apple has plenty of iPhones and iPads on hand in Germany already — enough that it’s not too concerned about losing out on the Christmas consumer binge there. The company even says as much in the brief statement it issued on the matter today.

“We’re going to appeal the court’s ruling right away,” an Apple spokesperson told AllThingsD. “Holiday shoppers in Germany should have no problem finding the iPad or iPhone they want.”

But what about after the holidays, when that inventory begins to run out?

Again, Apple’s fate largely depends on whether it’s able to stay the injunction pending appeal, assuming Motorola attempts to enforce it. Beyond that, there’s the validity of the two 3G patents at issue in the case, and whether or not they are standards-essential and subject to fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing terms. More on that over at FOSS Patents.