Apple Ordered to Pay $625 Million in VirnetX Patent Dispute

[LovingTeddy]

Um, no.

When a person or company make certain money, they should forced to donte to charity and taxed for social benefits, like single payer health care system.

Companis are benefit from society, they should forced to give back to society as well. There are lots of sick people need help...

 

[pat500000]

I'm glad Apple got sued for this. Apple started this suing war. Because Apple got so much money, I'm sure 625 million is nothing to them. Because of this, Tim will get his head right and refocus on making computers with expandability...because they will depend on consumers to keep their luxurious homes updated with IOS.

 

[LovingTeddy]

Let’s start with you. I want a law passed that limits your wealth to, oh, five hundred dollars. That’s all you are allowed to have. What do you think?

Five thousand is little bit too excessive. For companies makes billions of dollars and top executives making millions of dollars, they should have the responsibilities to give back to society.

Now, if I earn couple million dollars a year, I don't mind take 50% of my income and give to people who need the money.

 

[dannyyankou]

Good. Apple has too much money, anyway.

Yeah, and those people in college that have grades over 85% are too high. Round them down to 80%, throw the extra points in a pool, and distribute them to everyone that has under 70% That's fair!

 

[mariusignorello]

Apple really does have too much money. They need to give at least 1/2 of it away. Some to charities. Lots to me. There needs to be laws that limit how much money a person or company can have.

I'd hate to have the mods flip on the "Politics Religion and Social Issues" switch.......

 

[Karma*Police]

Apple must be a patent troll too since they hold many patents which they don't use/make products using them. I guess those patents should be made invalid and someone else should be free to use them, right?
[doublepost=1454542869][/doublepost]

Time to invalidate all of Steve Jobs' patents then since he's no longer alive.

A "patent troll" is generally defined as an entity that produces nothing and whose sole purpose is to extract licensing fees from companies that do.

 

[oneMadRssn]

Patents are ultimately about promoting the public good. If some product society deems very important (oh, say mobile phones) can't be reasonably produced without using certain patents, then it's reasonable to declare those patents subject FRAND regardless of the wishes of the inventors. It's not like they won't get paid at all, and almost by definition there should be a lot of licensing fees. Considering another alternative is not to have patents at all that's not so bad.

I agree that patents are about promoting the public good, and I think those ends are achieved when patents have value. This value allows investors to make bets on start-ups, allows creditors to recoup losses in a bankruptcy, allows companies to trade and value innovations, and encourages engineers and scientists to try things in fields they are unfamiliar with or try things that have long odds of working out. All of this is possible when patents are valuable.

If a standard setting body (let's say IEEE for example) wants to set a standard, they should take their time to ensure their standard isn't infringing anyone else's patents. They certainly have the means and to do that - most of these standards spend many years in review. If they find a patent is infringed, then either license the patent or design around it. Remember this is all prospective, looking forward. If a standard is set, then there can be no patent by someone else on that standard later on, because the standard itself will be invalidating prior art. I don't feel bad for these organizations when they don't do their due diligence.

Patents shouldn't be encumbered by FRAND, which makes them a lot less valuable, without some affirmative action by the owner or inventor that makes that encumbrance fair. That encumbrance shouldn't ever be applied after the fact.

Also, almost everything can be deemed a public good worthy of promotion. If a farmer invents a new more efficient way of of picking wheat and patents it, should John Deere Tractors and Kubota Tractor just be able to make a "standardized" device that picks wheat that infringes the farmer's patent and pay the farmer only FRAND rates without the farmer having any input on the standard or the matter at all, citing the public good in cheaper food? The farmer has a right to say no, New Holland Tractors is willing to pay me more so you guys can't do this, f your standard. Or he has a right to say no, VirnetX is willing to buy my patent and try to make a deal with New Holland Tractors, also f your standard.

 

[69Mustang]

A "patent troll" is generally defined as an entity that produces nothing and whose sole purpose is to extract licensing fees from companies that do.

Who made that quote? Definitely not me. Could you have mistakenly attributed someone else's quote to me.?

 

[stopthenonsense]

But at some point down the line the patents now asserted by VirnetX were purchased by someone that paid money to a bona-fide inventor. Are you saying inventors that have no interest in licensing or commercializing an idea shouldn't be paid? Are you saying creditors that lend money to start-ups shouldn't be able to recoup their losses when and if those start-ups go bust?

I'm deff against trolls that bring nuisance suits, trying to extract settlements for less than the cost of litigation. However, clearly VirnetX is not that troll. They were ready and willing to take it all the way, and they did.

A patent troll is a company of investors that typically pay little to nothing for companies that are going down just for their patents and no intent of making anything. A patent is only enforceable if the company that has it is actually making a product with it. These patent troll companies make a living suing companies like Apple. They stifle innovation.
[doublepost=1454547463][/doublepost]

Apple really does have too much money. They need to give at least 1/2 of it away. Some to charities. Lots to me. There needs to be laws that limit how much money a person or company can have.

I hope I'm not the only one that thinks you are insane. Go vote for Bernie and give up half your stuff at the ballot box.

 

[Wowereit]

Over half a billion dollars sounds awfully high for VPN patents in a video conferencing and messaging service that is given away for free as a bundle with a device

Awfully high?
Apple shipped over 1 billion devices with that functionality.

 

[alexgowers]

The issue with patents is they don't allow independent creation or dual patenting of the same idea. Fundamentally that has to change to reflect the reality that many inventions aren't copied. The only patents that should be granted have to be unique in a way that no one could stubble upon, like a passage from a novel for example, and you should have to show that certain things were directly copied from you and they aren't essential standards i.e. Wifi or supplied by a 3rd party that owns rights etc. Patents right now require so much technical knowledge a judge or jury has zero chance of understanding the tech involved let alone determining an infringement.

I feel like there is also no system in place to check if you infringe on someone else before you actually do it. Essentially holding companies to ransom for fees that could have been avoided or engineered in a way that did't infringe.

Big companies shouldn't be allowed to bully small one and vice versa, it should all be in the spirit of progression, the laws should encompass that, patents are the reason technology is shifting away from the US and into more free markets. It's just bad for everyone involved to keep the laws the same.

 

[Carlanga]

Umm misleading the jury at closing arguments?
I guess Apple got:

[doublepost=1454548045][/doublepost]

The issue with patents is they don't allow independent creation or dual patenting of the same idea. Fundamentally that has to change to reflect the reality that many inventions aren't copied. The only patents that should be granted have to be unique in a way that no one could stubble upon, like a passage from a novel for example, and you should have to show that certain things were directly copied from you and they aren't essential standards i.e. Wifi or supplied by a 3rd party that owns rights etc. Patents right now require so much technical knowledge a judge or jury has zero chance of understanding the tech involved let alone determining an infringement.

I feel like there is also no system in place to check if you infringe on someone else before you actually do it. Essentially holding companies to ransom for fees that could have been avoided or engineered in a way that did't infringe.

Big companies shouldn't be allowed to bully small one and vice versa, it should all be in the spirit of progression, the laws should encompass that, patents are the reason technology is shifting away from the US and into more free markets. It's just bad for everyone involved to keep the laws the same.

You can always apply for a patent for a new technology though. That way if someone had already patented it then the patent office is responsible in deciding.
I remember when I was 7 y.o. I had an idea about using measuring cups w the pour on the bottom so that fats stayed behind. This came to me because my grandma used to freeze to separate fat from liquid. After I told my mom she told me that already exists and that is when I stopped inventing I guess

 

[Karma*Police]

Apple, along with Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson, and Blackberry performed a textbook troll move by forming Rockstar Consortium and subsequently suing Google, Samsung, Huawei and others. So yup. Patent troll in that instance.

Ha, I forgot about that. However, Apple still creates products so while not a true patent troll, I guess you could say they're trolling by association since they spun off Rockstar which is a true patent troll.

 

[diegov12]

Ha-ha... It is nice to see Apple eat their own ****... Suing everyone's ass off and now Apple get sued. Hopefully more company sue Apple and Apple will learn the lesson.

lol.
Do your research before you talk.
Apple uses those patents in a commercial product, patents trolls don't.
:d

 

[AppleScruff1]

So sad. If this company's sales were hurt by Apple's infringement, that's one thing, but they don't sell any products which is what makes this patent troll situation so criminal.

The patent system is clearly broken, but I feel like patent trolls is one aspect of it that can be addressed relatively easily... and should be addressed because they produce absolutely nothing and increase the cost of doing business which ultimately gets passed on to consumers.

But it's only broken when Apple loses, when Apple wins, justice has been served.
[doublepost=1454549084][/doublepost]Check out Apple's involvement with patent trolling.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/09/apple-made-a-deal-with-the-devil-no-worse-a-patent-troll/

 

[a.gomez]

There, Apple also found willfully infringing on patents - as guilty as everyone else. Who cares if they not doing anything with it, it belongs to them - Apple cant just take it.

 

[69Mustang]

Ha, I forgot about that. However, Apple still creates products so while not a true patent troll, I guess you could say they're trolling by association since they spun off Rockstar which is a true patent troll.

See that's a difference without distinction. Apple (and the rest) didn't spin off Rockstar. They took 2K or so of the choicest patents and divided them among themselves. They sold the other 4K patents for $900 mil to a defensive patent company RPX. Rockstar ceased to exist after the sale. Rockstar was a patent troll, no doubt about it. Rockstar was Apple and their cohorts. As Rockstar they were patent trolls, and not by association, but by action. They only filed lawsuits on patents they bought and had no products.

 

[blut haus]

Well to be fair, Apple actually makes products that use those patents. As far as I know, VirnetX does not make a single product and is essentially a patent troll.

Regardless, shouldn't Apple pay to use the patents that someone else owns? I mean, patent law is severely messed up in this country, but Apple has the $.

 

[Daws001]

Wouldn't it be cheaper for Apple to just buy VirnetX and then burn them to the ground?

 

[duervo]

apple did lawsuit on Samsung for their "patent" for rounded corners….

apple is so ridiculous…

In 2011 they sent their lawyers to threaten a woman which had just opened a little café in germany to help young mothers with their childs. She offered tea, coffee and her famous apple-cake.
So she named the café "Apfelkind" (= apple-child) and draw a logo of a RED apple with the silhouette of a baby inside AND the hand-written-style name "Apfelkind" beneath. NOBODY can be confused, there is just no similarity at all (look at the photo in the german article). Of course she wanted to protect her "brand" - because if her project would grow, she planned to sell bakery products and cups and so on with her logo on it. and perhaps open more cafés.

After not even 2 weeks she received threatening letters of apple´s lawyers…
(for the records: apple is the brand that stole the name and logo of apple records - it took until 2007 that they made a deal and finally payed for it!)
She thought then, this is a joke of someone - it was NOT. It was apple!
apple decision makers are reckless destroyers for profits sake and they are maniac.
(One day apple will perhaps go to court against GOD because he created the universe with apples on earth without apple´s permission?)

So, the poor young lady had no money to defend herself - but informed the press.
Many Tv-channels and national newspapers now informed the german public about the apple-methods of lawyer-terrorism on everyone.

http://gawker.com/5853402/apple-threatens-to-sue-tiny-german-cafe-whose-logo-is-an-apple

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtscha...fe-wehe-sie-veraeppeln-apples-apfel-1.1173840

It took TWO YEARS with the public getting more and more angry until apple stopped this ridiculous action…. in 2013 !!

Seriously??? Apple and Apple's lawyers are now a bunch of terrorists???

What's next? Calling them nazis and gestapo led by a modern day Hitler?

Has this thread really come to that?

Should I even be surprised?

Did I leave the oven on?

 

[DesterWallaboo]

And the biggest winners are the attorneys who will take the majority of the cash.

 

[jayisblessed]

I hope you are just trying to be a d..b a.. je.k!

 

[Glideslope]

And the biggest winners are the attorneys who will take the majority of the cash.

Bingo. VirneteX will be lucky to receive any of this within the next 5-10 years. Bruce and Apple legal will find an exit. The award is asinine. The Judge is in conflict. The decision is flawed.
[doublepost=1454554766][/doublepost]

Wouldn't it be cheaper for Apple to just buy VirnetX and then burn them to the ground?

Nice idea. But the assets acquired would not equal the cost of the accelerant used.

 

[LordBeelzebub]

If Apple keeps loosing lawsuits, the price of Apple products will keep going up so we cover the cost. I mean after all, Apple isn't going to sacrifice their mega profits to pay for them, they'll pass that down to us consumers. They infringe, we pay. Don't think it isn't true.

 

[mejsric]

I just realized that this site is overtaken by mindless Apple haters?