Normally the legal battles of major companies is something to which I pay little attention, and I suspect many of you feel the same. But for wireless developers the current situation bears watching. What has typically been the occasional legal battle is evolving into a full scale war.

A nice graphic that Verizon provided to the online publication Fierce Wireless highlights the current legal situation in the smartphone world. The graphic only shows the major companies and only captures a moment in time, but it makes quite clear the jockeying for patent positions that is going on in mobile communications.

Many, if not most, of these patent disputes involve software. A recent filing, for instance, pits Openwave Systems against Apple and Research in Motion for alleged infringement of software patents that Openwave holds on ways of connecting mobile devices to the web. It is interesting to note that the filing came shortly after Openwave paid $12 million Myriad Group for ownership of a patent portfolio.

At stake is a piece of the wireless broadband pie. A number of companies are hotly contesting to become major players in the market with their operating systems, handsets, tablets, or chips. Only a few will emerge on top, with the rest falling along the way. Apple and Google, for instance, are dominating the market for mobile device operating systems, with Microsoft and RIM at the back of the pack. Symbian and WebOS have fallen, and others will follow.

So, how does a company that has invested in product development generate a return when their product has failed? Sue the folks who have succeeded? And if it was successful? Sue the folks who are nipping at your heels.

Developers are starting to be caught in the crossfire of this war, some of which targets them directly. Apple apps developers, for instance, are being sued for patent violations on in-app purchase mechanisms. Other developers run similar risks.

More importantly, however, the unsettled legal issues make for an uncertain development environment. It’s risky to pin your product design on someone else’s software that, because of the need to avoid patent infringement, may change the way it (and consequently your product) works.

Developers should thus be keeping a lookout posted to see if the patent battlefield is moving in their direction, so that they can be prepared to survive the conflict. At the very least they should know which of these contests relate to them. Better would be having contingency plans in place, when possible, for implementing workarounds of contested software.

And make plans for the ultimate defense: money. Budget for unexpected expenses in the form of higher prices or royalty payments. The final objective of all these lawsuits is to monetize a company’s IP (intellectual property), i.e., make money. That usually means that rather than stop you from using their IP, companies simply want you to pay them for using it.

When the big guns finally fall silent and the smoke clears, the end result will probably not be that you cannot do what you planned, but that you will have to pay for something you thought was free.