Someone needs to learn about civil litigation. I recommended starting with easy-to-digest lawyer-run YouTube channels like LegalEagle or HoegLaw.
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Apple Ordered to Pay VirnetX Another $502.8 Million for Patent Infringement
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Nobody stole anything. And the patents have already been ruled invalid. So it’s yet to be determined whether anyone is going to pay for anything.
You are wrong. No company could possibly do what you are suggesting, even with hundreds of patent lawyers. (And keep in mind that first year patent lawyers from reputable firms typically bill at $350 an hour. The ones that know what they are doing are 2x that.)
There are millions of unexpired patents in the world. And even calculating the expiration date of a patent can take hours of work (there’s no simple formula. It requires a complex formula that potentially requires knowledge of how various patent treaties work, and then checking the entire correspondence with the patent office to see if that patent was subject to a ”terminal disclaimer” where the inventor agreed to let it expire early, etc.)
Just searching for patents, internationally, that are relevant to ONE potential inventive idea typically costs $10,000. And all that does is give you a list of patents that may be relevant to the one idea (e.g. swipe to unlock). There are millions of “ideas” in an iphone. VPN, alone, has hundreds of things involved in it that could be patentable. Just one “subsystem” of an iphone, like “FaceTime,” would cost millions of dollars for patent searches and lawyer analysis.
So now you have your list of 50,000 patents that may touch on your product. That cost you many hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars just to find the list.
Now you have to give it to the expensive lawyers to figure out whether any of the millions of CLAIMS in those patents are both (1) infringed and (2) valid. To determine if its valid, you go do another $10,000 prior art search for each patent. And then a lawyer has to look at the results and figure out whether they are meaningful, again at $500-750 an hour.
Now, when you are done, having spent a billion dollars, you see 50 patents that are invalid and worrisome. So you suggest “invalidating” them. Fine. That’s at least $250,000 each to file and prosecute inter parties reviews at the patent office. Double that for the ones you need to appeal to the federal circuit.
Then, for all the ones you think you don’t infringe, you get formal opinion letters, costing $50,000 each, so that you can try to use these later on as evidence that you weren’t intentionally infringing. (Because now you are “on notice” of the patents, so if you are ever sued, you may have to pay triple damages).
So you’ve gone and spent a billion dollars, and one of these people sues you anyway on a patent that you were sure you didn’t infringe, or that it was invalid. But a jury disagrees with you. The reasonable royalty was 1% of profits, but because you knew about the patent ahead of time, the jury decides to award triple damages, so now instead of paying $500m, you owe $1.5 billion.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Let’s look at what happened in this case.
Apple sued on a bunch of patents. It‘s later determined they don’t infringe a bunch of them. Some they were found to infringe.
Meanwhile, apple is, in parallel, contesting the validity of the patent. And they won that.
So apple has been ordered to pay a bunch of money for infringing a patent that the patent office now says was never valid in the first place.
So what is going to happen is that both these decisions are going to get appealed. If the appeal about validity ends in Apple’s favor before the appeal of the infringement ends in Virnetx’s favor, then apple is off the hook.
Who is going to pay the inventor? Not apple and you want "patent trolls" to not be able to buy the patents
Not VirnetX.
"While it’s looking for another big payout from Apple, the company is fighting allegations that Chief Executive Officer Kendall Larsen’s family makes up a fifth of the company’s 21 employees and the firm is “plagued by nepotism, waste, and corporate governance failures,” according to a complaint pending in Delaware Chancery Court."
Where there is smoke there is fire...right macfacts?
Did you actually read any of that. They sued for round corners ON THE DEVICE, and they sued for blatantly copied icon IMAGES, not for ROUND CORNERS ON ICONS.
You can look up their financials on your own if you like.
Here's a key quote that really says it all:
Whether it's their intent or not, their revenues don't come from product sales, but from patent litigation.
If that's all or most of you do, yes, that's literally the definition. Any further questions?
This $500 million might sound like a lot to you and me but it's just back royalties paid - they would have had to pay probably more than this if they'd used the IP legally. In the end, Aple still got a good deal on this.
This is why APL routinely steals IP. It's cheaper to settle in the courts years down the line than pay royalty fees up front in the beginning. Pretty despicable business practice.
This is why APL routinely steals IP. It's cheaper to settle in the courts years down the line than pay royalty fees up front in the beginning. Pretty despicable business practice.
None of that is true. Apple had no idea, nor could they have, at the time they introduced this product, that the patents existed or that they might be infringing. Indeed, two of the patents were found NOT to be infringed. And the other two were found to be invalid. Unless something changes during the appeals, apple won’t have to pay a dime, because the only patents they infringed were not valid in the first place. So they “stole” nothing.
Lol, liberal use of the word: “company”.
They don’t manufacture anything... they purchase up scads of patents that an ACTUAL company may be able to use in the future, so they can hold them hostage when they do.
The consumer is the real loser here... if a company can’t afford the extortion payment, that idea will never make it into a product.
Illegal? No.
SUPER sleazy & negatively affects us all? Absolutely.
What a company does with their Intellectual Property is THEIR business. If they have a rich patent portfolio then so what? It doesn't give a company like Apple any right to steal that IP and use it to generate revenue in their own products. It's theft so Apple must pay. Stop defending the criminals here.
Thanks for taking the time and putting some facts into this thread!
Apple's claims against Samsung focus on Galaxy's design features, such as the look of its screen icons
Apple's evidence submitted to the court included side-by-side image comparisons of iPhone 3GS and i9000 Galaxy S to illustrate the alleged similarities in packaging and icons for apps. However, the images were later found to have been tampered with in order to make the dimensions and features of the two different products seem more similar, and counsel for Samsung accused Apple of submitting misleading evidence to the court.[11][13]
"Even the icons in earlier versions of the Samsung smart phones looked different because they had a variety of shapes – and did not appear as a field of square icons with rounded corners," Reuters quotes the lawsuit as saying about Samsung's Android-based interface.
Samsung's Galaxy Tab line, it is to be noted, doesn't use those "square icons with rounded corners" that Apple called out in its comments on the Korean giant's smartphones – that is, unless those offending icons are provided by a third-party app, such Amazon's Kindle.
WOOOH
i give up at this point...LOL
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I don't know about 3 years, but yes.
Four of the patents involved are from 1998. They may have been particularly clever techniques for networking in the late 90s, but even just ten years later, technology had evolved significantly.