Your account is wrong. First, the judge does not rule on infringement unless it is summary judgment. And in summary judgment there is no jury verdict. You have both the judge and jury determining verdicts.
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Apple and Other Tech Companies Face Lawsuit Over Wireless Email Patents
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Your account is wrong. First, the judge does not rule on infringement unless it is summary judgment. And in summary judgment there is no jury verdict. You have both the judge and jury determining verdicts.
Not surprising at ll its in the EDVA (Eastern District of Virginia). This is one of the affectionately named rocket dockets....the others being the middle district of Texas and I believe the western district of Wisconsin. And yea, Bilski is irrelevant...that was business methods. This is pure patent prosecution.
And what do they own? Apple's iPhone sends email over a TCP/IP connection - the same as their desktops and laptops. What exactly are you claiming they "own."
It wasn't? I certainly wished I had it. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thought "one day, computers will be able to communicate wirelessly instead of using phone lines, like cell phones."
Sorry to burst your bubble. but there are currently 54,619 issued patents based on DNA and another 81,453 applications pending.
There is even a case where a university was granted a patent on cells removed from a cancer patient. When the patient sued for return of the cells and control over his own body parts the California Supreme Court decided that he was not entitled to any rights to his own cells after they had been removed from his body.
Source: http://www.actionbioscience.org/genomic/
Actually, my recollection was that he did summarily rule that RIM had infringed 4 claim across 3 patents. He sent the jury to determine the rest of the claims.
As you say, my memory might be wrong. In any event, he did immediately throw out the TekNow demo of prior art.
Try reading the patent (or at least one of the relevant ones):
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6317592
And explain to me what exactly was remotely novel about this IN 1999. The claims are virtually content-free, just repeating the same things over and over again for every conceivable variation. Apparently the process of adding "Received" headers is enough to baffle the USPTO into granting patents.
NTP also has patents that date to 1990 where they describe ideas in more detail including providing software algorithms
too bad you couldn't work out the details and software algorithms. it's more complicated than pulling your finger down to refresh your inbox
In a modern system, email and other kinds of transfer systems aren't even aware of whether the transmission is wired or wireless. You can basically take any program that works wired and it will work in a wireless environment as well.
I've read that up to $45 of each smartphone goes toward licenses.
For instance, most phone makers (including Apple) pay Microsoft for ActiveSync. Many pay a patent holding company for Visual Voicemail. Many might soon have to pay Kodak for including a digital camera with video viewfinder.
Apple is being sued now over their fast smooth scrolling technique, and could lose that patent case.
It's also yet to be seen if Apple has to pay past royalties and penalties to Nokia, which other phone makers have either paid or exchanged rights for.
All of these could add to the cost for Apple and other phone makers.
Apple is the unusual maker in that it doesn't like to exchange or license their patents. They're quite happy to take advantage of other companies doing this (as with the critical MS Exchange license), but won't do so themselves.
And where is the uniqueness? You aren't old enough to enforce this on people older than you who have been using this since before you were born.
Perhaps I should have patented my ideas for splicing into the optical nerve and brain to allow us to use calculators / computers that were built into the body using pressure-sensitive controls - in the late '60s and early '70s. Then I could have become wealthy when these were actually built (as they are being built now). Who knows, maybe it is some of my former physics students.
Actually, it had nothing to do with their stock price. RIM was forced to settle because the court refused to wait for the USPTO to finish the review of the 10 patents, even though several of them had been provisionally denied by that point. There was going to be an injunction which would have forced RIM to shut down their servers. That would have killed the company.
that's nice for a 3G cell system where my iphone has an IP address. didn't work that way back in the 1990's.
...which is precisely my point. The reason it is fairly easy to communicate over different types of networks is the TCP/IP protocol, and I happen to know that they actually tested it wirelessly by driving a car around San Francisco with a radio antenna on the roof. At least that's how Vince Cerf tells it.
We're talking the 1970s here.
Not only that, Intel learned that they coundn't trademark a number (586), so they came up with Pentium.
Copyright and patents are two different things
(Copyright lasts forever because every time mickey mouse is about to hit the public domain Congress extends the terms. Patents last 20 years from the filing date. Caveman could probably have convinced Congress to keep his copyright on the cave murals going, but his patent on the wheel is long gone)
I love Apple as much as anybody but if these guys created something then they deserve to be paid. We can't have big corporations pillaging little companies, it'll only stifle innovation. That's why we have these laws.
I think the whole point of patents is to protect someone who invents something from having their ideas stolen and exploited by others in a better position to do so. For ex.: If I invent something but I don't have the actual means to build and sell it, my only option is to shop it around to companies. If they turn me down but then steal my idea and sell it, shouldn't I have the legal right to be compensated for my idea? Requiring a smart but poor inventor to build and sell their idea would kill innovation; what's the point of coming up with ideas if he/she can never profit from them?
And I've heard some people talk about this being obvious so it shouldn't be patentable. Well, a flying car is obvious, but if I invent an actual method for making a workable flying car, then I should get a patent for that, no?