Get ready to rumble! You may have heard the ear-splitting plaintive wail bursting from the Mountain View, California Googleplex on Wednesday. Apple is launching an all-out litigation offensive against makers of Android devices for allegedly swiping the patented designs of its popular iPhone. And on a second front, Apple is teaming up with Google rivals Microsoft, Oracle and others to scoop up all of the wireless patents they can get their hands on. After losing out to its rivals in a bid to buy Nortel patents, Google cried–No Fair! In a fulminating rant on the company blog, David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, accused schoolyard bullies Apple and Microsoft of waging “a hostile, organized campaign against Android.” Drummond lamented that his rivals are using “bogus” patents to “strangle” the open source Android mobile operating system.

Google Was Warned

It’s not like Google and other iPhone copycats weren’t warned. When the now-ubiquitous iPhone was introduced to the world in 2007, Steve Jobs admonished would-be thieves to keep their grubby hands off Apple’s intellectual property. “We’ve been pushing the state-of-the-art in every facet of design… We’ve been innovating like crazy for the last few years on this and we’ve filed for over 200 patents for all of the inventions in iPhone. And we intend to protect them,” said Jobs. Many of those 200 iPhone patents are now the subject of lawsuits filed against Samsung and HTC. The lure of the iPhone’s fabulous multi-touch screen designs proved to be too much apparently.

Apple Goes to Court

The tech world has been witnessing a whirlwind patent infringement palooza and Apple is just getting started. In March, Apple sued HTC for swiping twenty of its iPhone patents and the suit has legs. In a swift rebuke, a U.S. trade committee ruled that HTC likely infringed on two of Apple’s patents. Apple is also embroiled in nasty litigation warfare with Samsung, in which Samsung has fired back with a patent infringement suit of its own. Apple claims that Samsung  “slavishly” copied its iPhone and iPad designs in developing the Galaxy mobile phone and Galaxy Tab computer. And Samsung is accusing Apple of infringing on a handful of its wireless networking technology patents.

Both companies have a lot to lose in the court battles. The U.S. International Trade Commission is considering the demands of both companies to block sales of each other’s devices in the U.S. Oracle is also joining in the patent infringement battle in a suit against Google for infringing on Java technology in the development of Android.

The Rush to Gobble up Patents

With the smartphone market ready to explode, the rush is on to buy existing wireless patents to gain an edge. A group of buyers, including Apple and Microsoft purchased thousands of patents from Novell in April for $450 million. And in a recent bidding war to obtain Nortel’s wireless patents, another consortium led by Apple and Microsoft outbid Google for an astonishing $4.5 billion. Google is now wailing that Apple and Microsoft are in “bed together” as part of a conspiracy to wage “anti-competitive threats” against Google’s Android.

The race is now on to capture InterDigital’s patents that are on the chopping block to the highest bidder. Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Google are all vying for the valuable wireless intellectual property. Google recently purchased a slew of IBM patents, but to keep its enviable share in the smartphone market; the search engine crybaby will have to step up its game.