Patents have become the apple of discord for too many companies these days, including the Redmond-based tech giant Microsoft, who is taking anyone to court in a second as long as it feels something's not right in its deals.

Recently, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco decided to uphold a previous ruling of a lower court that reduced the patent licensing fee for Microsoft in a deal with Motorola.

If you're a tech savvy user, you might know Motorola's complicated history. Google purchased the company and its patents a couple of years ago, and then sold it to Lenovo, but decided to keep the patents because they can generate money without moving a single finger.

In 2010, however, when Motorola was still on its own, the company signed a deal with Microsoft over a number of patents related to Wi-Fi technologies and the H.264 video encoding standard.

Microsoft and its own patents

Soon after that, Motorola tried to raise the fee, asking Microsoft to pay around $4 billion per year for these patents. Needless to say, Redmond didn't agree and started a long round of talks with Motorola over the price it had to pay for using the patents.

Negotiations, however, took more than anyone expected and because Motorola couldn't move a finger without the IEEE's and International Telecommunications Union's approval, the company had to agree to what it was called a “reasonable and non-discriminatory” deal. That didn't happen, though, and because Microsoft thought this wasn't right, it moved the case to court.

In case you're wondering, Microsoft's sitting on its own patent fortune too, as its Android patents are making more than $2 billion every year, without the company doing anything.

Plenty of big companies out there are using Microsoft's Android patents, including Samsung, Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, LG, and others, so it's pretty clear that owning such a thing these days is what could make someone successful overnight.