Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Ordered to Pay $302 Million in Damages to VirnetX in Patent Retrial
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Well put! The amount of thoughtlessness and shallow thinking in this thread is amazing. You articulate the issue very nicely!
I'd be surprised. China has been doing nothing but copying American products throughout the digital age, and their government turns a blind eye to IP while discouraging entrepreneurship and original thought.China will become leading country in technology development soon, while everyone in US will be developing....eee...lawyers
[doublepost=1475343484][/doublepost]EDIT: This was originally a reply to ForkHandles, but I misread his post.
Last edited:
And for all those crying foul about patent trolls
I do hope you realize that Apple is part of a large consortium of patent trolls. They are one of the founding members of "RockStar COnsortium" whose primary motivation is to purchase existing patents to use in either defense or litigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Consortium
so lets get off the "Patent troll" high horse and look at this case with more factual, and objective lenses.
A legal patent holder had a patent awarded. Apple used technologies that infringed on patent. When the patent holder came asking for a license deal, Apple told them to go away, but continued to use the technology. That company had to sue in order to protect their legal rights as a patent holder. Apple lost.
At the end of the day, Apple could have avoided this by doing one of two things. Change the technologies they were using to not infringe, OR pay the license fee. INstead they chose to purposefully and willfully infringe on the patent, and forced VirnetX to sue them.
I do hope you realize that Apple is part of a large consortium of patent trolls. They are one of the founding members of "RockStar COnsortium" whose primary motivation is to purchase existing patents to use in either defense or litigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Consortium
so lets get off the "Patent troll" high horse and look at this case with more factual, and objective lenses.
A legal patent holder had a patent awarded. Apple used technologies that infringed on patent. When the patent holder came asking for a license deal, Apple told them to go away, but continued to use the technology. That company had to sue in order to protect their legal rights as a patent holder. Apple lost.
At the end of the day, Apple could have avoided this by doing one of two things. Change the technologies they were using to not infringe, OR pay the license fee. INstead they chose to purposefully and willfully infringe on the patent, and forced VirnetX to sue them.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Really that simple. Just the cost of doing business. You steal, you get sued and you pay. No different than what Apple wants of its own patents.
Last edited:
Sure, but it was usually Apple trying to Sue the world, not the world trying to sue apple
Cry me a river about large corporations being picked upon. For every phantom I'll show you a legion of abuse by large corporations, across the globe.
Apple had the resources and wealth to license the tech. They chose to roll the dice, and that is on the legal staff assessments. For such visible technology Apple should have built a stronger case, and/or made every attempt to push this as part of any FRAND patented technology. If VirnetX refused they could have proven good faith in licensing and proved the company had no desire to license their technologies, but to extort potential competitors. Clearly, they failed on all their approaches.
Pay up.
On the contrary- any Apple patents should be automatically rejected, because anything Apple does is merely the "logical" way does things, and if Apple didn't do it somebody else would have.
Except most companies either come up with actual products, or actual unique ideas and not some vague patent that hasn't got a single line of code to back it up.
Which does not apply in this case, since the VirnetX inventors originally came up with their ideas by writing VPN and security code for government customers.
Yikes! Even more egregious than I'd expected. A bunch of patent troll companies that are clearly just maintaining some address in the area so they can file lawsuits in the jurisdiction. I'd really like to see the DoJ decree, "East Texas, you've lost your ability to handle any cases of this kind, at least for the next ten years" - those companies wouldn't all be there unless that court in particular was treating them highly favorably, so the court has clearly lost their impartiality.
This.
Interestingly, in one of these recent trials, Apple was totally unable to claim that they didn't know about a patent ahead of time. Here's what happened, IIRC:
Apple was arguing that the patent wasn't worth that much in royalties. As part of their argument, they had one of their own engineers testify that he had come up with the same idea on his own (something that happens a lot with software patents).
Unfortunately for Apple, their engineer said that his proof, was that he had also tried to patent the idea. But he couldn't because of the patent they were being sued over. Ooops!
That resulted in not only the patent being upheld as valid, but with Apple getting hit with extra damages for willfully infringing it, since they clearly knew about it !!
The problem is, the original idea of patents was that you could invent something novel, draw up the designs and send them to the patent office, and you would be granted a period of time during which you could implement and sell real physical devices from your design, without worrying that someone would simply copy your design and compete against you. This was a worthwhile and worthy notion. In exchange for the government granting you this protection, your idea was on file and available to the public, and after your period of exclusivity ran out, others could use your design as blueprints for making their own copies of your device. As well, the time periods for exclusivity and such were chosen when we didn't have the ability to have something mass produced and on every store shelf nationwide two weeks later. When it could take years for simply the knowledge that someone had invented a new can opener, or whatever, to spread across the nation.
These days, the "patent trolls" are quite literally gaming the system. The game is, "just how wide-ranging and vague of an idea can we get the Patent Office to give us a patent for?" And they get patents granted for some pretty vague ideas, like the concept of encrypting messages between computers. Not a specific implementation, but the whole general concept. When any decently capable programmer, faced with the same problem, would have implemented a solution very similar to the one that's patented. Not because they looked at the patented design, but because the solution was somewhere between obvious and inevitable - the exact opposite of novel, as is fundamental to the idea of patents and theoretically required by our patent system.
Then the trolls sit back and wait for someone else to do the hard work of actually making an implementation of the obvious idea work and work well, where the implementors had no knowledge of the patent, and they jump in and say, "Aha! We have a patent on that entire field of ideas! Pay up!" It's gaming a system to extract money from others, rather than using the system as intended to allow actual inventors to profit from their actual inventions. And it's putting whole ranges of obvious solutions to problems out of bounds, because someone got the Patent Office to grant them a vague patent that they can argue covers an entire area of research. This is harmful to society as a whole.
To be clear, I'm not saying patents are bad, I'm saying patent trolls are bad. Letting them game the system to take whole ranges of obvious solutions to problems off the table, hurts us all.
Because Samsung actually has products. These guys are trying to protect an idea that they never will ever try to work on.
Here is a link to one of the patents
"Agile network protocol for secure communications using secure domain names"
https://www.google.com/patents/US7921211
Doesn't look like rocket science to me. In short, the "innovation" is to have a set of routers between the source and destination. The routers can decrypt packages and send the packets between themselves for a number of hops to foil an eavesdropper. The routers can change IP address to complicate analysis further. The routers can't read the message being sent, because it is encrypted using a session key that only the clients know.
Any software engineer with knowledge about the network stack could "invent" something similar. If Apple has copied VirnetX implementation, they should be sued for copyright infringement. But the idea is not very special and i don't think it should be patentable.
"Agile network protocol for secure communications using secure domain names"
https://www.google.com/patents/US7921211
Doesn't look like rocket science to me. In short, the "innovation" is to have a set of routers between the source and destination. The routers can decrypt packages and send the packets between themselves for a number of hops to foil an eavesdropper. The routers can change IP address to complicate analysis further. The routers can't read the message being sent, because it is encrypted using a session key that only the clients know.
Any software engineer with knowledge about the network stack could "invent" something similar. If Apple has copied VirnetX implementation, they should be sued for copyright infringement. But the idea is not very special and i don't think it should be patentable.
Last edited:
Coming soon: A method to secure a database over the internet via obfuscation:
![upload_2016-10-1_17-37-23.png]( "upload_2016-10-1_17-37-23.png")
God knows the USPTO would approve it, and Texas would defend it.
I almost feel like stumping up the fee just to see for sure.
God knows the USPTO would approve it, and Texas would defend it.
I almost feel like stumping up the fee just to see for sure.
What you seem to be saying is you don't know anything about VirnetX. So instead of researching what they did/do, it's a lot easier to assert they only had an idea. Factual or not, it's a lot easier to just make an accusation with no proof amirite? This thread is full of informative quotes detailing what VirnetX is and does. You could read a few, research on your own, or continue making uninformed statements.
Yes, hence why I said "acquired".
Citation required (stealing implies prior knowledge).
No argument from me about buying the patents, but again, that assumes that Apple knows about them. And yes, I also know that Apple buys companies to strengthen their patent portfolio. The difference is that unlike patent trolls, Apple actually does something practical with most of their patents.
The solution is to make all known users of the patent at the time the lawsuit is filed named in the suit, thereby forcing Google to be named, and forcing Google to defend.
Also, no one should use the Google play store unless Google agrees to indemnify anyone using it for any lawsuits related to the store and not by the users.
Problem solved- do your research, know who you are getting in bed with. If Google is not willing to step forward and defend its customers for their alleged patent violations then they are the bad actor.
Wouldn't help.
Remember a company called Lodsys, who was doing this exact same thing to iOS developers about five years ago?
Apple had even licensed Lodsys' in-app purchase patent for their store, but Lodsys said each developer had to license it as well.
Under pressure from devs to do something, Apple filed a motion in Texas to stop Lodsys from suing iOS developers... which was promptly denied. Lodsys continued their lawsuits until quietly disappearing recently.
Last edited:
My confusion is the sum. It just doesn't make sense.
Apple v VirnetX - Infringing a VPN patent $302 million
Apple v Samsung - copying the iPhone $548 million
Seems the USA courts show favouritism to small companies and foreign companies. Samsung are still appealing and going through the courts. I'd like to see the final total combined bill for a case from legal, to witnesses, accommodation etc etc.
Apple v VirnetX - Infringing a VPN patent $302 million
Apple v Samsung - copying the iPhone $548 million
Seems the USA courts show favouritism to small companies and foreign companies. Samsung are still appealing and going through the courts. I'd like to see the final total combined bill for a case from legal, to witnesses, accommodation etc etc.
The problem isn't the patent trolls, the problem is the patent system. If a patent has value, it shouldn't matter how the assertion of that patent is structured: whether the inventor asserts it themself, whether the inventor hires a lawyer who didn't come up with the idea to defend it in court, whether a company engages their legal department which also didn't come up with the idea, or if a troll buys it as an asset and tries to recoup their investment.
If the patent is valid and has value and is being infringed by a third party, money should change hands.
The problem is that the patent system is a mess and issues patents that probably shouldn't be considered valid, but I really can't think of a good way to fix it.
20 years exclusivity might be too long in the modern era, that could be one fix.
Copyrighting software rather than patenting it sounds appealing until you look at the spate of plagiarism suits over music recently-- deciding what "sounds like" something else is at least as, if not more, ambiguous than who came up with an idea first.
Better up front review to screen out patents will cost a lot more, and that cost will get passed to the inventor-- on the one hand that will reduce the number patents and probably select for quality, but on the other it will further disadvantage small inventors.
You could place fault on the inventor for not making the infringer aware of the patent and negotiating before the infringing product was released, but that makes it too easy for an infringer to put their hands over their ears and pretend they never heard about it.
I tend to think the means of trying patents is broken as well. There should be a specialized court system to address it and there's no way these should be jury trials. Most jurors are barely competent to determine guilt in a videotaped murder, let alone decide if a lossless compression codec is novel.
If the patent is valid and has value and is being infringed by a third party, money should change hands.
The problem is that the patent system is a mess and issues patents that probably shouldn't be considered valid, but I really can't think of a good way to fix it.
20 years exclusivity might be too long in the modern era, that could be one fix.
Copyrighting software rather than patenting it sounds appealing until you look at the spate of plagiarism suits over music recently-- deciding what "sounds like" something else is at least as, if not more, ambiguous than who came up with an idea first.
Better up front review to screen out patents will cost a lot more, and that cost will get passed to the inventor-- on the one hand that will reduce the number patents and probably select for quality, but on the other it will further disadvantage small inventors.
You could place fault on the inventor for not making the infringer aware of the patent and negotiating before the infringing product was released, but that makes it too easy for an infringer to put their hands over their ears and pretend they never heard about it.
I tend to think the means of trying patents is broken as well. There should be a specialized court system to address it and there's no way these should be jury trials. Most jurors are barely competent to determine guilt in a videotaped murder, let alone decide if a lossless compression codec is novel.