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Apple Must Pay Over $700 Million in Major Patent Damages Case
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It’s absolutely not an anti-American thing but countries that ignore patent law are immune from this as well. Just because it’s legal that doesn’t mean it’s right. There were a lot of things in US history that were legal but very wrong.
I’m not against Apple suing companies for infringing on their patents and I’m not against other companies suing Apple for the same. If some glass company develops a scratch resistant glass and Apple decides to use it without license then they deserve to get sued. If scumbag lawyer number 1 and scumbag lawyer number 2 create an LLC just for the purpose of holding and creating patents then suing those that “infringe” on them that’s a different thing. Those patents need to be invalidated, the company dissolved, and number 1 and number 2 provided free housing at one of our finest facilities 😂
In many cases, they are actually in the business of buying patents from inventors and licensing the rights to those patents to others—not patenting pre-existing inventions (such patents will not survive an IPR). While the industry may be prone to some excesses (and the US legal system could likely be made more efficient when it comes to intellectual property rights), intellectual property is just that—property, which can be bought and sold.
Patent trolls—also known as non-practicing entities (NPEs)—get a lot of hate but they also create a (slightly) more efficient market for intellectual property. If you as an inventor wanted to monetize your invention without having to build a product or go out and find licensees, you could sell it to an operating company (who could build the product) or an NPE (who could license the product).
And yeah, patent trolls can be bad too. But let's not pretend that the big tech companies are that much better. All those major tech companies (like Apple or Samsung) have massive patent portfolios that they use aggressively to shut down emerging competition.
Haha, now you know how Samsung feels when you patent trolled them for their tablet which you said looked like and iPad. I found that to be F#cking ridiculous since I owned both an iPad 2 and the first Galaxy Tab. What goes around comes around.
Um well the early Samsung efforts were DIRECT copies of Apple UI and industrial design and they lost and settled - they then deiced to at least put some effort in and now Samsung do make great stuff.
Another blow for Apple. Not sure Apple can do much in this scenario than to pay up.
You can’t compare a legitimate company like Qualcomm to a company that’s designed to sue other companies. One makes a product and the other extorts money from companies that make products.
Nope, I don’t see any reason a company should exist to solely hold patents and sue others for infringing on them. If you invent something you have the right to patent it. If you manufacture or sell a product, you have the right to patent it.
They have no grounds to appeal again. This is the end of the line for this case. I suggest Tim Cook swallows his pride and pays up quickly before the judge adds even more interest on.
The news continues to change but the same old tired tropes remain the same.
This ^^
They are all sitting on huge patent portfolios, a vast majority of which aren't being used in products.
They gobble them up as a form of business protection.
Like it or not they are legal. Given that these patent trolls are almost exclusively based in the US President Trump could probably change the law and ban them if he wanted to.
You make a valid point but this problem exists because the US loves litigation. I don’t know if Trump could simply ban these companies but I know nobody else could given that they are all based in the US.
There's no cost to sending infringement notice letters (which some may analogize to a shakedown). There's very much a penalty to unsuccessfully suing, because good lawyers (which you need if you're going up against Apple) are expensive. In the UK, you face an even worse possible outcome, because if you lose, you not only have to pay your lawyers, but you also have to pay the prevailing party's legal fees & expenses (or some meaningful portion of them at least)—there's insurance for that (ATE insurance), but that still costs a pretty penny. Patent trolls/NPEs that go after companies like Apple are almost always well funded.
Generally, people will react that way to secret courts requiring changes to company policy and demanding access to international (not UK) data.
What point is there to say "only under court order" if there is no public oversight of the court to make sure it is for UK citizens, in the UK, who have actually been arrested? What is the justification for secrecy around an investigation if the suspect in question has been brought into custody?
There needs to be transparency, or else rule of law goes to "punishing those who we want punished".
Why not? I get the hate against patent trolls, but having a market for patents is—at least arguably/in theory—something that promotes innovation. Do you think inventors should not be allowed to monetize their inventions? What system would you propose in the alternative?
Not paying anyone wha they're owed is a really effective way to accumulate wealth.
Your argument is really weird given the context is Apple being sued for ripping people off. Not to mention the stock value of any given corp is totally irrelevant -- See TSLA relative to the companies performance
Apple should just buy the court /s
Apple has a design patent. They must defend it to be valid. They may not always win, but it also helps to make public how “close” you can get before its infringing.Haha, now you know how Samsung feels when you patent trolled them for their tablet which you said looked like and iPad. I found that to be F#cking ridiculous since I owned both an iPad 2 and the first Galaxy Tab. What goes around comes around.
They won’t leave the uk. I’m in the uk. And if they do, I’ll just use android. There’s not that much difference between android and iOS now anyway.
I’ll still use my Mac. If I lose iCloud that’s ok, it doesn’t work properly a lot of the time for me anyway. I imagine that apple’s server farm is full of the old waste paper bin style Mac Pros, from how their cloud services perform.
So if I read this right, Apple didn't like the licensing terms so they just used the technology without paying and dared the patent holder to sue, which they did
I don't know what Apple was expecting
If you don't think the terms are fair, go argue it in court. You can't just use it and hope nobody notices
I don't know what Apple was expecting
If you don't think the terms are fair, go argue it in court. You can't just use it and hope nobody notices
Milking the crap out of its customers with rip off SSD and RAM prices that are orders of magnitude more than they should be, that's the problem.
He may have made money, but at the expense of everyone else, customers and not paying for using patents.
There is transparency. Once the criminals have been identified and caught they are subject to trial in open court.
You need a degree of secrecy when tracking international organised crime gangs otherwise they will quickly shut down their networks.
This law was intended to help the fight against international terrorist groups and peadophile networks who use private cloud services like iCloud to share child abuse images.
See, I'm not particularly a fan of patent trolls—and I think sometimes they can be engaged in some pretty bad behavior (shaking down businesses with the threat of litigation backed by dubious patents)—but they also provide a market for inventors to monetize their patents. If the only way you could monetize a cellphone-related patent was by starting your own cellphone company, that would create a huge barrier to entry and there would be very little incentive to work on such inventions. Instead, we've created a legal regime that treats patents as property and we allow people to trade (i.e., buy and sell) and license patents. Allowing anyone to buy and sell that intellectual property (not artificially restricting it to the few companies that already manufacture a product in that space) helps maximize potential value for inventors (and thereby, incentive to innovate).
You could certainly think of alternative legal systems for intellectual property, but please do consider all the consequences of adopting a different system (including, for example, the incentives that are created or destroyed).
Many great inventions (and patents covering those inventions) are the product of scientific research, including academic researchers who never have any role in product manufacturing. I don't think it makes sense to limit the ability to patent an invention only to those who manufacture products.
