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Apple Ordered to Pay VirnetX Another $502.8 Million for Patent Infringement
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It definitely is not a ”real“ democracy. Just look at your election system 🤣
How about this?
If you come up with an idea, you MUST be able to produce and sell a product based upon your idea within a specific timeframe for your right to the idea/patent to remain valid.
And there must be other ways to achieve the same end result for a patent to also be deemed valid for a certain amount of time.
Would that not seem reasonable?
If you come up with an idea, you MUST be able to produce and sell a product based upon your idea within a specific timeframe for your right to the idea/patent to remain valid.
And there must be other ways to achieve the same end result for a patent to also be deemed valid for a certain amount of time.
Would that not seem reasonable?
Apple's expert previously testified that $0.06 per unit would be a reasonable warranty. That was a straight forward calculation based on the $200 million licensing agreement VirnetX entered into with Microsoft in 2010.
He also testified that $0.01 per unit would be a reasonable royalty for devices that only used FaceTime (and not VPN on Demand). That was based on the period of time when FaceTime sold in the App Store for $0.99 and the estimation that VirnetX's patents represented 1% of its value.
An invention becomes obvious the moment a patent application is published, if not earlier. That doesn't mean the protections provided to its inventors (or assignees) should end.
Yeah. But that goes to whether the invention really was non-obvious to begin with. To the extent we have big picture problems with out patent system, I'd say they largely start with how we interpret that requirement. We perhaps grant patents for inventions which shouldn't be considered non-obvious.
I don't think Apple made a settlement offer, at least not one that we're aware of. What it did was argue that, if there was infringement (which Apple still effectively argues there wasn't because the patent claims are invalid), the reasonable royalty would be lower - something that would add up to $113 million.
Maybe you could shed some light on the matter, instead of condescendingly citing two youtube channels and try to make it look like you made a point.
The jury would have heard expert testimony from each side relating to what a reasonable royalty would be. So, no, they wouldn't just pull a number out of the air without having heard what each side thought would be appropriate.
But they wouldn't have heard settlement offers which the sides made to each other, if they made any settlement offers.
So, yes, Apple's expert(s) offering a lower suggested royalty rate might have caused the jury to pick a lower rate than it otherwise would just as VirnetX's expert(s) offering a higher suggested royalty rate might have caused the jury to pick a higher rate than it otherwise would. VirnetX previously offered testimony that a higher rate, $1.67 per unit, could be reasonable.
That Apple don‘t owe punitive damages for their use of another company’s IP. Oh, wait...
Apple knowingly violated patent law and accepted that by offering to pay 112 million. Apple regularly violates patents and just sees it as opportunity cost, "is violating this patent cheaper than us developing it?". Which isn't fair to the patent holder, and they get away from some freebies because smaller companies don't have the resources to take the Apple giant to court.
Call it trolling, but a patent is a patent and if they made it first, Apple needs to honor that. If the shoe were on the other foot, Apple would crucify the company that violated them.
Call it trolling, but a patent is a patent and if they made it first, Apple needs to honor that. If the shoe were on the other foot, Apple would crucify the company that violated them.
We have been experimenting with democracy for the past 243 years. We didn't even attempt to allow Blacks the right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Women could not vote until 1919.The Voting Rights Act was decimated in 2013, and Women still make significantly less for doing the same jobs.
Politicians are absolutely a separate social class in 2020, and SCOTUS will soon begin the process of removing the rights of states and local authorities to decide their own laws.
I'm glad I have no grandchildren.
Well, I'm not saying it's good at any of those things.
But the "the US is a republic, not a democracy" assertion suggests understanding neither of those terms.
I doubt it even cost $500,000 (if you remove another order of magnitude, it starts becoming plausible), but I'm not sure what point you're making.
In patent law, to determine damages, you imagine a hypothetical negotiation.
The hypothetical negotiation I am imagining involves Apple saying “that patent looks neat, but rather than taking a license to your patent, we will just work around it. It will cost us a million to do that.” In that case there is a strong argument that the damages would be capped at a million dollars.
This may or may not have been raised by apple’s experts. There may be some strategic reason it wasn’t. But it’s very common to make this sort of argument in patent cases.
But if no one challenges patents, they stick. Even bad patents. I'm not going to continue to wade into the did Apple do wrong, or not, but say that, YES there are 'bad patents', and the only way to get then rescinded/quashed is to violate the patent, and put up a good defense for doing so. Some defeated patents were so outrageously bad, it would be hard to make a case for granting them int he first place. Some are so blatantly 'wrong', they DO stifle technological innovation. Yet some bad patents are in worthless industries and useless technology that they aren't tested.
So, if Virnetx just sits on patents, waiting to spring their trap, and they are at all overly broad or vaguely written, they are a major part of the problem in MANY industries. Any kind of protection can be taken too far. That there is a ton of money in defending bad patents is not in dispute. Defending and winning a bad patent case often involves a massive 'golden shower' of money from others that might have violated them at the same time, or later.
So, the issue is 'what is a bad patent', and why are they so heavily litigated. Because of the money! They have a trap sitting there, ready to spring on anyone that they feel is infringing on their idea. I think of it as like YouTube, or the music industry. One guy on YT that I've watched had a 45+ minute video that had three seconds of audio, and out of those 45+ minutes of video, it was the three seconds that caused the muckity mucks at YT to freak out when they got a take down notice. Over just three seconds. Musicians have been sued for songs that use three notes from existing music. It's damned nuts. So are patents at times. Overly broad patents stifle innovation. Overly broad patents suck money out of the industry and achieve so little.
But, you guys keep arguing about companies sucking the air out of the industry, bloodsuckers that only market their 'goodies', and wait for people to dare use anything close to that.
I guess my point is: If a patent is 'valid', it should be used for more than a trap. It should be 'active'. If it's just used as a trap, what the hell are you defending? Patents were to protect people's products, their ideas, their longevity, their business. If patents are your 'business', that just seems wrong to me. It's a cudgel, it's a weapon, it's a cheat to make money while sitting in your longue chair on your multi-million dollar yacht, sipping thousand dollar champagne. The purpose of the patent then isn't to protect an invention, or idea, it's to protect your income. That is not what the patent system envisioned, I'd bet.
Argue on...
Then, of course, if there was such cheap workaround, Apple would have employed it long ago.
But they did, didn’t they? My understanding is there is no allegation that the current version infringes.
There's more going on in that article.Here's 1 fact:
I actually linked that EXACT page if you even bothered to read the first page of the comments on this thread
Apple Ordered to Pay VirnetX Another $502.8 Million for Patent Infringement
FaceTime was a "peer to peer" implementation which would have cost Apple little to no money to run the service. By having it peer to peer, it was entirely possible for an open standard to happen. Since the peer to peer method was infringing on VirnetX's patents, Apple had to redo FaceTime...forums.macrumors.com
And if you read the article that you linked yourself, you would see Apple changed it "because it had been found guilty of infringing patents owned by VirnetX."
Congratulations. You proved my point.