Quick update on the Lodsys patent infringement shakedown of iOS and Android developers: Apple's just filed a motion to intervene in the company's lawsuit against various iOS devs, arguing that Apple is already licensed to use Lodsys's patent and that license covers developers using Apple APIs. That's almost exactly what I predicted Apple would argue when Lodsys first started making noise, and exactly what Apple hinted it would do in the letter it sent Lodsys a few weeks ago. (To catch you up on the saga: Lodsys claims to have a patent on... something vaguely related to in-app purchasing, and although Apple has a license to the patent, Lodsys claims that third-party developers to pay again for their own licenses.)

I'm not going to dive too deep into the filing, since it's mostly bare-bones procedural language, but if you're interested my friend Patrick Igoe has a good post up on the subject. The big takeaway for the rest of us is that Apple is aggressively defending iOS against this type of lame patent trolling, and that's good news for developers and consumers alike. The next big questions are determining how far Lodsys is willing to take this, and how Google intends to handle this situation on the Android side.