Apple Won't Have to Pay $309M After Judge Accuses Patent Troll of Abusing System to Fleece Tech Companies

[4jasontv]

You’re not wrong in that PMC was working within loopholes in the law as written and the standard procedures of the USPTO, which they abused in the most egregious and predatory ways possible in order to make large profits.

Which is I suppose kind of the point of this ruling; if you make an absolute mockery of the intent of the law by abusing some loophole in its application, it’s within the powers of an appellate judge to invalidate decisions for that reason.

Worth noting is that a lot of similar patent trolls aren’t going for hundred-million-dollar paydays from Apple or Microsoft, they’re going for ten-thousand-dollar paydays from hundreds or thousands of small business owners who do not have the financial wherewithal to defend themselves in court. So the sort of precedent this sets doesn’t just apply to big companies with armies of lawyers, and you can bet if this company managed to get these ridciuous patents through, there’s someone else who would be willing to buy one and start slinging lawsuit threats at every small business they can find.

I was curious so poked around a bit into the actual patents (8,191,091 and 8,559,635).

Looking at the actual patents in question, it’s even more egregious than I was assuming. The two patents this lawsuit was filed on the basis of were both continuations of patents originally filed in 1987, continued multiple times until the legal loophole was closed in 1995, at which point they sat on the patents, which weren’t actually granted until 2012 and 2013, respectively. Indeed, even the 1987 patents were continuations-in-part of patents originally applied for in 1981.

Which is to say that these were patents based directly on 1981 filings (the opening process drawing of one of them shows a radio and a TV set as the primary components) being granted over 3 decades later, and well after the system being described had been in widespread use for years if not decades (if I read correctly, the entire pay-per-view cable box system of the ‘80s and ‘90s could probably fall under one of these patents).

It boggles the mind that the patent system ever allowed people to pull a con like this, although I guess I should give some credit to patent trolls willing to wait over 20 years for the payday.

I am not defending the system, but it seems like the only way to fight the big companies is with lawsuits like this.

The easiest solution I can propose over a mid-morning coffee would be 2 years for all IP except audio and video (6 months) and software code (3 months) from the date the initial paperwork is filed. No extensions. Most protection would expire before protection is officially given so if anything it would serve to draw attention to your idea so that others can build on it. But, if someone violates your rights during the active period you could retroactively go after them.

 

[Ubele]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I worked for Hayes, the company that invented the personal-computer modem. As I recall, the company filed very few patents. The one major patent they relied on was the escape sequence that toggled the modem between voice and data-transmission mode: a one-second pause, followed by +++, followed by a one-second pause. The pauses were to disambiguate the three plus signs from plus signs that were data. Hayes licensed the escape sequence, for a pretty hefty fee, to the inevitable competitors that arrived on the modem scene. For several years, a modem had to be Hayes-compatible, because Hayes was the standard. Eventually, a group of competitors got together and decided to stop paying the licensing fee. Their contention was that the escape sequence was "too simple to patent" and that "anyone could have come up with it." Hayes sued. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in Hayes's favor, saying that 1) it wasn't possible to legally define what "too simple to patent" might be, and 2) even if "anyone" could have come up with the escape sequence, it was Dennis Hayes and his partner, Dale Heatherington, who did -- and, had the Court sided with the competitors, anyone could infringe upon almost any patent on the grounds that "anyone could have come up with it." For a couple years, Hayes collected millions in previously unpaid licensing fees plus damages.

I'm not trying to draw parallels between that case and this case, but they're both interesting from a legal and ethical standpoint. I side with the judge against PMC in this case, for reasons that he and other posters have iterated. I don't get those who side with PMC on the grounds that "Apple can easily afford to pay $308 million" or "well, Apple infringes on copyrights, too!" When they do, they need to be held liable, as should any anyone who does it.

 

[pankajdoharey]

Apple makes stuff never charges others for patents, apple never shares patents nor license sell or relicense them, they aquire patents to build products this law firm has been Abusing patent system to get money out of companies that were actually inventing real things. This firm is at this since 80's, such a shame. FOr 40 yrs they made a career out of stealing money from people by suing, imagine how many technology companies could have inventd great stuff much sooner but went under because of them. Such acts pull the technology progress backwards and pull entire Humanity back, they should be ashamed of stopping Human Progress. If i see the owner of this firm in the road he is getting a slap from me.

Inventing and not using is dependent on market, Aquiring patents as a law firm and having no plans to ever use them and charging exhorbitant fee in the name of patent violation is trolling.

 

[Makosuke]

The easiest solution I can propose over a mid-morning coffee would be 2 years for all IP except audio and video (6 months) and software code (3 months) from the date the initial paperwork is filed. No extensions. Most protection would expire before protection is officially given so if anything it would serve to draw attention to your idea so that others can build on it. But, if someone violates your rights during the active period you could retroactively go after them.

I could be misreading your proposal, but I think that's more or less exactly what we actually have now?

My oversimplified understanding of the process since the 1995 change is that you apply for a patent, then if and when it's granted the patent is valid for 20 years from the date of application. The issue is that the 1995 law change applied to any patents applied for at that date, but those patents themselves could be continuations of patents initially filed years or even decades earlier, as was the case with the two patents in this lawsuit.

As with all patents, your right to the concept is protected from the moment you apply for it (hence all those "patent pending" lines in new products) until its expiry, so for the window between when you file and when it's granted you still have exclusive rights if the patent is granted, no matter how long that takes. Someone else who wants to use the technology during that window can (I think?) either license it from you under the assumption the patent will be granted eventually, try to demonstrate prior art so it doesn't get granted, or ignore it and get sued once it's granted.

 

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[cmaier]

Supposed to work - read a few patents and how insanely vague and general they are written to try to cover as wide as possible an entire area of solutions to a simple, common problem, trying to block off anything and everything you could possibly do to solve a challenge.

Back in the early 1990s I worked for a company that paid a patent troll for every decive we sold in the USA (not in the rest of the world). Why? We had a graphical cursor and every possible way to have that was patented.
- have another layer in hardware where you draw the cursor and show that in priority over your framebuffer so as to not "damage" the drawing in there: patented.
- have a cursor you XOR and then XOR again to undo the damage in your framebuffer: patented
- save the information under the cursor and put it back as the cursor moves out: patented
- even the moronic: redraw the entire screen on cursor moves : patented.
[I was tasked fresh out of the university by a pointed-haired manager to try to find a technical solution to the legal problem - lol]

Sure all of those patents should have been voided anybody who understands the concept of a cursor knows you only have so many ways to show it and avoid damage to the information as the cursor moves out, but the burden to get a patent voided is way too high. That is why the trolls can keep on squeezing a bit of money out of every device sold. And how they get rich without lifting a finger or contributing anything to the society at large.
The one person at I suppose Xerox labs who invented in the 70s or so the graphical cursor: now that one deserves credit - but it was their doing writing up those broad patents, nor would that still have been valid in a world gone graphical completely.

So if some of the larger ones like Apple who have deep enough pockets to actually kill the bogus patents: please let them do so.

But the more fundamental problem lies in the overly broad patents that are enforceable by the patent trolls without the burden being on them to proof the patents have any value or merit. And they last for WAY too long in our modern world.

I’ve read a thousand patents, at least. I don’t believe the asserted patent says what you’re saying. You could have just done it exactly like xerox PARC did it, for example, as that would be prior art to any patent that was asserted against your company (if what you are claiming is true). More likely is that the patent you infringed claimed a specific method of doing it, and that’s what your company did.

 

[Makosuke]

Nope: it's way too hard to get rid of patents that have no merit, are written intentionally way to broadly etc. Some patents go as far as to just state the problem and patent any and all solution to the problem without even mentioning any one of the possible solutions in any detail - leaving you vulnerable to the trolls just for solving the problem on your own and doing the actual work yourself (even without knowing some lawyer has such a patent in their portfolio).

Hence: make it way easier to completely get rid of patents by a simple test were you pay a dozen fresh engineers a day to outline a solution to a problem: if they violate said patent (enough) without them knowing the patent itself and hence "reinvent" it on the spot: patent is voided as it has no merit as an "invention".

Ahh, I misread and thought that your spitball-time-length proposals were for the time to get it granted, not the whole patent.

2 years seems really short to me for many genuinely good ideas, simply because it can take longer than that to actually manufacture and market the thing, so your patent may well have expired by the time you get the product out the door.

For software-method patents, though, that sounds totally reasonable. Mostly because I think software-method patents (probably software patents, period) are incredibly stupid and shouldn't exist at all, and that the entire concept is actively harmful to society while providing virtually no benefit. It's demonstrably true that the vast majority of highly skilled programmers will continue to have creative ideas even without patents, because the vast majority of them never patent anything they come up with in the first place.

I don't know about your "dozen engineers given 24 hours to find the same solution" test for being obvious, though, since plenty of genuinely creative ideas that probably should be patentable could be come up with one out of 12 days by a fresh engineer given 24 hours to work on it. Caveated that I'd take it for software-method patents, just like I'd take anything that weakens software-method patents, because they're stupid.