Apple Number One Target for Patent Trolls With 171 Cases in Five Years

[BaldiMac]

Yeah, thats the theory.....

But the reality is that patents have been granted for utter nonsense, and that companies holding these do either hold other companies at ransom

Sure, but you are generalizing and arguing semantics. Your "hold other companies at ranson" is another person's "enforcing their patents."

or even use them in an outright war of destruction (include obvious Jobs quote here).

Jobs was a fiery guy. Prone to hyperbole. You don't need to take everything literally.

 

[3282868]

You can't patent ideas. Only specific implementations.

Which seem to be more idea's than actual methods.

All kidding aside, my point was it seems more common that patents are being awarded without much merit; as idea's passing as implementations. It's a very fine line.

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Far too many software patents are similar to your description.

A good example is Apple's so-called "universal search" patent (aka the "Siri patent"), which is not about a specific implementation, but more of the general idea of searching multiple sources using generic object-oriented methods.

Any current college CS student, if tasked with the same problem and told to solve it using OO techniques, would come up with the same idea.... without knowing about Apple's patent.

This is the problem with software patents. Developers all over the world are constantly inventing the same solutions. However, only large companies can afford to keep applying for (and refining) such patents, much less defending them.

Software patent infringement is almost never about outright copying. It's more often about accidentally coming up with the same method to solve a problem.

Spot on.

 

[BarryL]

Jobs was a fiery guy. Prone to hyperbole. You don't need to take everything literally.

No kidding, some people need to lighten up.

 

[thermodynamic]

We need a reform in our patent system. It completely blows and allows leeches to mooch off company's efforts. Regardless if said company is Apple or not. Patent trolls stifle innovation everywhere.

The patent system was quietly reformed, with full bipartisan (read "corporate owned") support and signed by Mr. "Change we can believe in" himself in 2011. If anyone changed, it was Obama. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the not-so-better.

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I guess this is an unfortunate side-effect of innovation and financial success in our lousy patent system

Like putting patents on capacitive touch buttons that Samsung and other companies have been using for years already?

If patent trolling like what everyone, including Apple does, took place in the 1970s - back when Apple copies Xerox and Xerox probably wished it patent all the stuff Apple copied (GUI, mouse, etc) - today's "environment" would be rather different...

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While somewhat true, patents must still exist. There's already a diminishing incentive to innovate. Take the pharma industry -- as requirements for clinical trials increase (especially once personalized medicine takes hold), the actual market time under patent protection will decline. It's already a battle with generics companies, which now also have legal protection against product health and safety concerns, while the originator does not

When there's no money in it, or when someone that buys a patent and waits for someone to do the work before showing the worker the paper and whining 'MINE, MINE, MINE!' -- the only people who can't see how broken the system is either crafted the system to get to this level or prefer watching Snooki and Brittney.

 

[alent1234]

The first Android phone came out in Oct 2008. So, 21 months after the iPhone was announced. That's pretty close to the two year minimum that you suggested.

during the samsung trial, samsung wasn't allowed to submit as evidence a touch screen phone they had in the lab at the time of the iphone's announcement. i forgot the state of development, but it wasn't just apple working on touch screen phones at the time

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But those were not actual competitors. They were really subpar. Competition began in 2010. Hardware was ofc in the lab. Who cares about hardware? ARM processors were out there, Qualcomm chips were out there, touchscreen panels were out there. It doesn't take a genius to put them together in an enclosure. The software is the actual problem.

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It came out, but it wasn't an actual competitor.

from what i remember the original iphone didn't do MMS and had no copy and paste. something the first android phones had. people bought the iphone for the web browser

 

[BaldiMac]

during the samsung trial, samsung wasn't allowed to submit as evidence a touch screen phone they had in the lab at the time of the iphone's announcement. i forgot the state of development, but it wasn't just apple working on touch screen phones at the time

I never said they were. But the innovation of the iPhone wasn't simply that it was a touch screen phone.

from what i remember the original iphone didn't do MMS and had no copy and paste. something the first android phones had. people bought the iphone for the web browser

After you finish moving the goalposts around, you should probably note that Android didn't actually have universal copy and paste (Gingerbread) until about 18 months after the iPhone.

 

[rsocal]

Absolutely

"We've patented the Hell out of this thing, and we intend to protect our intellectual property" -- to paraphrase Steve Jobs during his iPhone presentation.

2007: Ballmer laughed. "No physical keyboard!" he bellowed. Most people couldn't see the point in an iPhone; over-engineering a problem that doesn't exist, they said. "Apple to add a physical slidy-keyboard in the next iPhone", everybody hoped (yes, really, there was a huge amount of speculation about that).

RIM laughed, and kept their phones the way they had their phones. Phones running Android slowly took away keys and made them more touch-oriented -- but that took some time.

Then everybody suddenly claims Apple are patent trolls, because now companies argue 'there's no other way to do a phone'. 'There's no other way to do zooming', oh, 'Apple have patented a rectangle. Hurr durr hurr.'

I think you'd feel much differently about your intellectual property had you sunk millions into R&D, hardware, software, supply chain, agreements with carriers where your phone is your phone -- the lot. Apple put their balls on the line, and the rest reap the rewards.

And what happens? 6 years later, we're reading "live by the sword, die by the sword" comments. This is MacRumours FFS, it's meant to be a community of Apple enthusiasts, not a community of people scrambling to write their oh-so-witty comment first.

Absolutely, I couldn't agree with you more!
Thank you for articulating that so well!

 

[AppleScruff1]

What about Apple's deal with a patent troll?

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

 

[dec.]

What about Apple's deal with a patent troll?

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

Yes, what about it? Do you have an opinion? And how have things been going for "Digitude"?

 

[blitzer09x87]

what goes around, comes around...

 

[pacalis]

The common sense in business is that there were no major ("disrupting") inventions since the early 90s (www). What we "invent" now are just applications based on research from 20-40 years ago. This is one of the major reasons why the economy is not growing as fast as it should.

Disruption is a misused term. It was also popularized by Christensen in 1997, and not in common usage until way after the bubble. So not only were there not any smartphone companies to disrupt in the 1990s, the term wasn't even used.

On innovation, the definition of that is typically some form of value from newness. It doesn't have to be invented in 2010 to be innovative. Electric cars are over 100 years old but Telsa is still innovative. The smartphone industry has created huge value in the last decade and is tremendously innovative.

Smartphones are more evolution than revolution and those rubberband-gimmicks and the other stupid trivial software patents that get protected today can barely be called innovation. It's not smarter than the invention of the radio-button or the modal dialogue.

So software patents are generally not particularly innovative. However, like all patents, most are utterly worthless. But that's the same with startups, development efforts, academic papers, etc... most suck. If you going to troll Apple with a really bad patent, you're not going to be in business for very long.

In short, I think courts aren't perfect but eventually sort out this stuff quite well and it is a self-correcting problem. If anything, it allows smaller firms to raise financing and keeps the bigger firms on their toes.

On the US economy, probably a lot of our inability to capture value has to do with the horrible investment climate in the us, the complete ineffectiveness of the US government in technology investment/infrastructure vis-a-vis many countries in asia and the US companies going cheap with manufacturing and taxes over-seas.

 

[I.Love.Apple]

One explanation for this (the fact that Apple is targeted the most) could be that Apple is a patent midget when compared to tech giants (like IBM, Samsung, Microsoft etc.). This is especially true in the wireless/mobile arena.

 

[peterdevries]

Imagine how much more productive people would be if there were no IP laws. Anyone could make anything they want and do anything they want with it. No lawsuits, lawyers, trials, patents, licensing fees, more lawyers, high-level negotiations of any kind required to make or use any product.

No-one would be doing any inventing, because it would be impossible to earn back the costs of innovating. The purpose of patents and IP laws is to to ensure that someone who invented something has the possibility to use that invention exclusively for a certain amount of time to recoup the investment.

Imagine yourself investing $10,000,000 into the development and initial production of a smart watch or something like that. The moment you put it on the market without a patent, someone takes the thing apart and produces the thing too. Throws a bit more effective marketing at it and pushes you out of the market. You will not be able to recoup your investment.

With a patent you will be able to exclusively produce and sell the product without the danger of anyone else stealing the idea and pushing you out of the market. That is the purpose of patents. Without them, we would be living in the stone ages of computing and consumer electronics.

Another matter is the actual implementation of software patents and such, which could be improved, but we (including you) cannot live without patents.