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Apple Plans to Appeal $439M 'Final Judgment' in FaceTime Patent Lawsuit With VirnetX
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I really hope Apple win's this, I can't believe how these Patent trolls are destroying technology. They literally are adding nothing to this world!
Apple is an amoral company that attempts to cheat people for money. They cheated me. I wrote the speech spoken by now dead Robbin Williams "What will your verse be?" which Apple stole to sell iPads. I'm just a person, sure, but perhaps such essentially criminal organizations should not be allowed to exist. What good is a giant company that refuses to pay its taxes anyway? I like Apple products, but being party to robbery taints every purchase.
A lot of inventors are financially unable to enforce or produce their patent on their own.
So they sell their invention to someone who can. A lot of so-called patent trolls are like that. They're in business to make back what they paid for a patent and more, so naturally they go looking for infringers.
Yes, Apple had to publish apologies to Samsung in the UK. Depending on your viewpoint, it was either a childish, or a humorous, sequence of events:
- High court rules (as did the entire rest of the world) that Samsung tablets did not infringe Apple's generic rounded rectangle patent.
- Apple spokesman makes a public remark about how such "blatant copying is wrong", even after the ruling.
- Samsung asks for an injunction against such comments, but judge says freedom of speech allows public disagreement with court judgments.
- However, using a UK law, judge does order Apple to put a link to the judgement outcome on their UK website and publish it in newspapers.
- Apple posts a web link to the judgement as ordered, but on their own they also add false intimations that Samsung had been found guilty of copying the iPad in other countries.
- Judge orders Apple to apologize for continuing to make false assertions, and to now put the trial outcome on their website's front page, not just in a link.
- Apple claims it'll take "two weeks" to change their website. Judge says they have 48 hours.
- Apple makes the change and adds an "apology" for posting "inaccurate" information. However, they also add Javascript code to hide the apology below the fold when the page first comes up, no matter what your screen resolution is. A few days after this intentional hiding is noted by tech sites, the code is quietly removed.
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Right. Apple can afford to take this all the way. This way only those that can afford to pay expensive lawyers for years will try.
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Fun fact: The Judge that ordered Apple's "apology" was on Samsung's payroll a bit later.
Ah, the famed Gabriel Collaboration Suite. The one so many people rely on for secure and convenient communication. You remember back when we'd all "Gabriel" each other, back before Apple stole all their business with Facetime?
Two apologies after the first was ruled non-compliant. Ironic thing is Apple is now copying everything from Samsung from phablets to pen, face unlock, OLED display, etc. but what do you expect from a Chinese government owned company.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/03/apple-apology-samsung_n_2069174.html
The High Court Judge who ordered the apology was Judge Colin Birss. He never worked for Samsung or Apple.
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The judge you're probably talking about is the Rt Hon Professor Sir Robin Jacob, one of three other judges who upheld that order upon appeal. Sir Jacob was retired, but he was asked by the Court to sit on the appeals bench because he used to be England's senior patent judge, and his opinions on IP carried weight throughout Europe. He's pretty much beyond reproach.
As a retired IP judge, he's also often used as a consultant in IP cases. His law clerk later got, and he accepted, a request by a US law firm to be one of nine experts to give an opinion on an ITC case Samsung was involved with against Ericsson. His written opinion apparently was related to comparing open source vs software patents. He was never on Samsung's staff.
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It's too bad that money is such a deciding factor in the judgement but Apple didn't start this fight either. Patent trolls don't need engineers or designers. They only need a good legal team.
I don't know if its the shots and beer, but this made me really LOL, enough to quote it.
Yes he should if you could without a doubt prove that he outright stole multiple things you owned and then profited from from those ideas like the ideas Apple stole from Virnetx and made billions.
My point was that the process has not completed. We have appeals in this country for a reason. The original poster was claiming Apple should just pay the amount since "they have it in the bank." I could very easily obtain a default judgement against the original poster (I would not do so as it would be unethical) and by their logic they should just "pay me" rather than availing themselves of legal remedies to potentially overturn the judgement. That's ridiculous.
Apple may or may not end up being held liable for an infringement. By many accounts Virnetx is a patent troll. Apple can and should exhaust all appeals and may be found not to have infringed or to be liable for a different amount. We have a system and process, it will run its course.
Actually, Apple kind of causes these fights, with their policy of not listening to licensing requests until after they get sued.
In this case, it also didn't help that it came out that Apple knew that they were infringing, but just assumed that they could fight the patents and win.
Apple's lawyers first tried to claim (like lawyers always do) that the VirnetX patents were invalid. Unfortunately for them, it came out that they stifled an Apple engineer's testimony that he had once tried to patent the same method, but had found that VirnetX already had done so. Ooops!
Not only did this prove that Apple had known about VirnetX's patent, but that they themselves thought it was worth patenting. Moreover, it showed that Apple was trying to hide their knowledge that they were infringing. These are some reasons why they're being hit with extra penalties for intentional infringement.
Likewise, those who infringe on patents often just need a good legal team. Just look at the way Apple constantly tries to belittle cellular patents that have been licensed for years.
And, unlike patent trolls, VirnetX was created by the very engineers who invented the base patents they license.
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Quite the contrary for both. See above.
Apple intentionally infringed, there's no doubt about it. And VirnetX is not a troll.
The only question is how much Apple owes.
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I'm reminded of an old lawyer joke:
Associate to partner: "Justice prevailed!"
Partner: "Appeal immediately!"
Associate to partner: "Justice prevailed!"
Partner: "Appeal immediately!"
courtesy of Wikipedia:
"Some call VirnetX a patent troll because they expanded their Patent Portfolio beyond the original four Internet Security Patents to include more than 100 related patents, thus securing their position as a leader in mobile security technology, and based on the fact that the majority of their employees are lawyers and they have yet to commercialize any of their patents in commercial products."
With all your speculation, opinion, and incorrect numbers, you missed the fact AAPL is now worth $800b, the biggest and most profitable company in the world, and sells 3 times as many iPhones as it did with Jobs at the helm.
Twice I believe. The first apology was so heavily loaded with snark/subtle attacks, that the judge got extra pissy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...non-apology-apology-samsung-very-cute/321881/
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don't play this game.
The Judge (Koh) in the US case, who originally favoured Apple 1billion in awards (and later forced to be corrected many many times and cut by more than 1/2), was originally on the Law team that represented Apple in Patent disputes in the same jurisdiction and has benefited widly financially from Apple's Patent suits through the years.
The case against samsung is still being bantered around because many of the judgement and decisions she made were highly questionable, with other judges repudiating her, and in some cases having to overrule her judgement along the way.
Do I honestly think there's bribery or something fishy going on here? no, just a judge with some bias. If we go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, logic goes out the window. Lets not do that.
"Some call"??
Wikipedia is not a good source, especially for opinions about anything that has affected Apple. The ADF often adds biased junk to previously neutral articles.
Again, never believe Wikipedia. It's easy to go look it up that they have 20 employees, of which at least 12 are officers and secretaries. This includes the core inventor team, most of whom had been working together for fifteen years.
As for patent troll, that is usually defined as a patent collector that did not invent anything themselves. That's not true in this case.
As for adding related patents onto their portfolio, that's just smart business. Apple does the same all the time by buying up other companies, whose patents become theirs and which are most often never used.
Heck, Apple spent billions buying Nortel patents, took a few they liked, then gave the rest to a patent troll they created which only employed a dozen engineers looking for infringing code to sue over.
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The sheer unavoidable fact is that Apple intentionally infringed valid (though what a lot of people think are obvious) patents. That's why they have to pay VirnetX. It's no different than what happened to Samsung infringing Apple patents. Well, except Apple continued to do so even after the first trial.
Now, the real question is, isn't $1.25 or more per device actually too much for IM and Facetime? I would think so.
Also, I think Apple has since switched to a different method. Anyone know for sure?
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you mean like Apple and their participation in Rockstar Consortium
People REALLLLLY need to be careful when bantering around with "Patent Trolls" cry out, then going on to defend a company blindly that participates in the identical behaviour.