Seem like the very definition of a patent troll.
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Apple Ordered to Pay PanOptis $506 Million for Violating LTE Patents
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Thats gotto be the dumbest thing I have heard on this forum. There are teams in tech companies whos job is to make sure no patents are being infringed upon. And surely Apple knew when they were taken to court. They could just check. This blind defending of Apple needs to stop. To think people are defending Apple in this case but they were okay when Apple went after a company with a pear shaped logo. Its bananas.
No, there are NOT teams to make sure no patents are infringed in companies. In fact, companies really don’t want to try to figure that out ahead of time, for three reasons:
1) there are more than 10 million patents in the united states alone. Only millions of them are still in force, but add in all the foreign patents, and you’ll see it’s an impossible job.
2) there are many more millions of patent APPLICATIONS out there, and millions of them aren’t even published yet. So you start working on a product, and 18 months later the application is published, and it could be years later before the patent issues (potentially with changed claims), and you still end up infringing.
3) if you KNOW about a patent, you think you don’t infringe, but a jury later decides you do, then you can be liable for enhanced monetary damages (e.g. 3x the amount of money). So it’s Very risk to go looking at other companies’ patents.
I worked at 3 different companies designing CPUs. I guarantee you that NOBODY at any of these companies spent any time looking at other companies’ patents for any reason whatsoever (Unless we were sued).
What specific patents were infringed upon? Just LTE?? These types of articles only give half-information.
As someone who works in a semiconductor/electronics manufacturing company and work with such teams, I disagree. I also refuse to accept that Apple has no such teams. Your statement that companies don't want to try to figure that out ahead of time is utter ********. Go back and ask your colleagues how these things work.
I don’t need to ask my colleagues. I started designing CPUs professionally 25 years ago, and worked at a couple of the biggest chipmakers in the world. Kindly explain to me what process your company uses to review millions of world wide patents, patent applications, and unpublished patent applications, so as to make sure that if they are later accused of infringing one that they now definitely knew about, they are not subject to treble damages under 35 USC 284? Do they get a written opinion of counsel for every patent they find? (Keeping in mind that costs 10s of thousands of dollars per patent?)
You logic makes zero sense. A trillion dollar company doesn't have a team to check if a patent is being used or not? So Apple is free to take all patents it wants and wait for companies to sue them? All the thousands of patent owned by other companies, Apple isn't required to check any of them? Why didn't they do that w/ qualcomm? Obviously they know about those patent somehow? Hmmmmm, maybe a team of theirs checked?
Sorry, that's not correct. You have to patent an actual implementation / method. No perpetual motion device unless you provide proof that it works and how it works. You may try in the claims to use that method to cover a wide range.
Here's a claim from an actual patent. You think this is truly inventive?
1. A system for customizing a product according to a user's preferences comprising: a remote server including a database configured to store a product preference of a predetermined product for at least one user; and
a first communication module within the product and in communication with the remote server;
wherein the remote server is configured to receive the identity of the predetermined product and the identity of the at least one user, retrieve the product preference from the database based on the identity of the predetermined product and the identity of the least one user and transmit the product preference to the first communication module.
And those patent firms and internal teams do so with the best of intentions and to the best of their ability. There could be 50,000-100,000 patents related to a company's invention. Some may infringe on the face, some may be questionable depending on the claims. Some may be candidates for challenging. It's almost always a strategic call and never as clear cut as you think it is.
Trademarks are different.
If you're looking at me to justify every patent decision on every patent, ain't gonna happen. But remember it's a claim based on the invention. Claims are tossed all the time without invalidating a patent. If you have some experience in patents, and I seem to remember that you do, you know that a claim is where you try to apply your invention to cover the widest possible use, and many times to block potential competitors efforts. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't.
I will say that repetitive federal budget cuts have damaged the ability of most of our federal agencies to do the kinds of jobs we may have expected of them in the past.
If you toss all the claims in the patent, then you have no patent left - the thing that matters in a patent is the claims. That’s why patents are tossed all the time by the federal circuit and lower courts. I have a whole database full of patents that were found, after they had already issued, to be not directed to subject matter that can actually be patented (Screenshot attached).
I don’t know anything about the patents in this particular case, but it’s silly to dispute that there are bad patents out there.
Except there are patients on perpetual motion devices. US20070246939A1, US patent 6,960,975 (Volfson), and the host of Perpetual Motion Devices Patents (Class 415/916)
Let's face it the US Pattent office, if it wasn't clear before, is a total joke as they can't follow their own rules and have become a defacto (spell corrected wants to render that as defect
) rubber stamp department. Though to be fair most of the time these perpetual motion device descriptions are such convoluted technobabble that it would take a while to realize they are a perpetual motion device.
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Have you even looked at their website? All it does is talk about the value of intellectual property. These are people who have contributed absolutely nothing to society and all they do is hoard obscure patents for the sole purpose of waiting to sue someone for actually making viable products by implementing the processes in said patents.
And of course they were “lawfully in their rights” (redundant statement by the way) to sue Apple. That’s the whole point of being a patent troll. You’re exploiting the justice system for your own personal gain.🙄
It's called royalties, you sell your products with our stuff inside we want a cut of everything you sold with our stuff in it
Just laughing at people and refusing to explain isn't helpful in building a community.