Apple sues Nokia's pet patent trolls Apple on Tuesday filed an antitrust lawsuit against Acacia Research Corporation and Conversant Intellectual Property Management, alleging that the two "patent assertion entities" have colluded with Nokia "to extract and extort exorbitant revenues unfairly and anticompetitively from Apple" and other companies. The lawsuit comes …
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The key word in your post is "Standards".
These then come under FRAND when it comes to patent licensing. Well, they do if those patents are essential to making the tech work.
That means that the patent owner has to give the same terms to ALL licensees.
When the details of the patents become clearer people with more understanding of the tech needed that us here will be able to see if they are indeed covered by FRAND.
If Nokia are in the wrong then they need to be taken to the cleaners (unless their legal manouvering as described makes it impossible).
If Apple are at fault then they need to stump up. (goes without saying}
I can't get the phrase 'last throw of the dice' out of my mind.
Aren't round corners a pretty standard way to avoid the issues of sharp ones? Guess most baby toys have round ones exactly for that reason, and after all, that's where most Apple designs come from.
Or Apple wants also to decide what s "standard" and what is not?
Well that's the message we should all be taking from these shenanigans. All tech companies play the same games with patents. Nokia sues Apple, who sues Samsung, who sues Apple, who sues Nokia. And so the lawyer-go-round never stops.
Frankly it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the real world and I've stopped caring who wins/loses.
Just because Apple say its a standard doesent make it so.
Notice anything that Apple have copyright of is NOT a standard but anything they want to steal/use IS a standard.
My own thourghts are "who cares what a criminal organisation thinks? until they pay tax they should not be under the legal protection of the countries. Incedently these regulations they are protected by are partly funded by the taxation that is not being paid"
FRAND?
7.3mil USD based on how many phones Apple has shipped that the courts have found to violate the patents?
7.3 mil is peanuts when you consider the legal fees. It could be FRAND for all you know.
Considering that in July of this year, Apple celebrated 1 billion iPhones and assuming all of the phones violate the patent... That's roughly 7 tenths of a cent. ($0.0073)
Tell me that's not in the FRAND range.
All big companies hoard patents for obvious technologies and procedures that everyone uses. They're mostly garbage but it costs a lot of money under the current broken system to invalidate them. It's a weapons stockpiling standoff between the big companies with an occasional warning shot.
Apple believes Nokia partnered with trolls so that lawsuits against Apple come from various companies that evaporate at the first sign of trouble. If Nokia sued Apple directly for infringed nonsense patents, Apple could counter-sue in the same manner.
Apple believes Nokia partnered with trolls so that lawsuits against Apple come from various companies that evaporate at the first sign of trouble. If Nokia sued Apple directly for infringed nonsense patents, Apple could counter-sue in the same manner.
That would be the Apple which has structured their entire company around tax avoidance and the Apple which which has run suppliers into the ground if it'd save them a couple of cents getting precious about spun off companies because it means their army of lawyers has to work a bit harder to avoid paying for GSM patents. My heart bleeds.
Not all of Apple’s innovations have been stellar successes, some of them have indeed been trail blazers …
Unfortunately the 3.5" jack is ubiquitous because it does the job in the same way as WiFi/Bluetooth/USB if not more so (plug it in, it works), this is just a way of locking in Apple-brand headphones. Bluetooth headphones still aren't as practical or sound as good after all this time.
One of the key patents used in mobile phones was from the 1940's and Nokia (nor Apple) filed it. It was filed by Hedy Lamarr (the actress) and musician friend for frequency hopping. Nor did Nokia invent radio communications, a rather basic invention since smartphones are radio transceivers.
I suggest you learn something of patent law.
You can have an idea and submit a patent on it.
I can see your patent... improve upon it, cite your patent in my patent application and get a patent granted.
Now assuming you were correct, Apple could spend the money to invalidate the patent. But they don't do that. Why is that?
;-)
Yes, patent law needs to be revamped and software patents and business process patents should be tossed.
“Can you patent the "courage" required to remove the headphone jack?”
That’s the same courage it took to remove floppy disks, CD ROMs, modems and RS232 ports from desktop computers as well as the buttons from phones. The same courage to make USB, WiFi and BlueTooth standard on all of its devices.
Not all of Apple’s innovations have been stellar successes, some of them have indeed been trail blazers …
Erm, the iPhone has 4 physical buttons.
I suspect that you are suggesting that the iPhone was the first to ditch dedicated physical dial/hang up buttons. It wasn't.
My 5" HTC Athena didn't have them on the phone's body and IIRC the Neonide N1 didn't either.
I suspect that you are suggesting that the iPhone was the first to ditch dedicated physical dial/hang up buttons. It wasn't.
IMHO, that was the worst UI mistake in history.
If there was one thing you could be certain of on a Nokia phone, it was that hitting the red button meant' stop/off/hang up". It was always there and always reachable. Ever tried to end a call on an iPhone if you have just looked up something? You first have to get to the phone UI again before you can drop the call which is not as efficient as having the Big Red Button always accessible.
I'm OK with most Apple ideas, but this one has sucked from the first iPhone (that is, from my perspective, your mileage or level of suckiness may differ).
I thought seven years was normal and 17 years for some patents if you managed to extend them somehow.
I would think many would be expiring by now.
It is not like the pharmaceutical scum that somehow manage to charge exorbitant amounts for 50-year-old medications 'because we have to prescribe branded medication'.
FRAND covers only standards patents. If you want to participate in the standards process you have to agree to license your patents used in the standard under FRAND terms. So Nokia, who participated in standardization of stuff like 2G, 3G, LTE and other cellular standards, can't sue Apple or anyone else under different terms.
Apple has some standards patents (many acquired, but they do participate in standards processes for stuff like USB, wifi, and IIRC are involved in 5G) which they license under FRAND. They have other non-standard patents like patents for touch screens, rounded corners and assorted other crap which are NOT covered by FRAND, and importantly using someone else's FRAND patents licensed under FRAND terms cannot obligate you to license non-standards patents back to them. It isn't allowed under the terms of the FRAND license to have such a requirement.
It isn't clear yet whether Nokia is suing Apple because Apple is using Nokia's standards patents and not paying at all, because Nokia is asking Apple to pay more than others (by using the bullshit Motorola strategy that was thrown out of every court they tried it in where they claim a 2% licensing cost is attached to the retail price of the entire phone) or because Apple is using Nokia patents that are not part of standards and Nokia thinks they should pay a higher price than Apple thinks it should pay.
Typically in a patent dispute the company that is on the hook won't pay anything until a price is agreed upon. By paying something you agree before going to court that 1) the patent is valid and 2) set a minimum price. So just because Nokia says Apple is refusing to pay doesn't mean anything - it just means Apple thinks the case will end up in court because Nokia is asking more than Apple thinks they should and/or Apple thinks some of the patents may be invalidated by prior art etc.
"Apple is certainly not an innovative company"
All you're doing there is proving that you either don't know much about what Apple has done or more likely that you're too lazy to do any research and you are just knee-jerking.
The innovation mostly happens where users can't see it. For example the innovation got the Mac off the ground wasn't the things that the users could see, it was QuickDraw which provided a fast, responsive graphic environment on slow hardware. There are lots of features in QuickDraw that were revolutionary at the time. The Xerox Star for example used the "painter's algorithm" for drawing on-screen (as did all GUIs at the time). Bill Atkinson speeded that up immensely by only re-drawing the screen elements that had changed. Then there was HyperCard (1987) which was credited as the inspiration that led Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee to conceive how a WWW browser would work.
There's much more. I'm not going to bore anyone with it, but claiming that Apple doesn't innovate and only copies is just fanboi hating.
Apple is certainly not an innovative company, they are one of the best at copying and then telling the world it was their idea in the first place.
You're confusing them with Microsoft. The simplest way to discover that is actually USING Their gear, which you clearly haven't or you wouldn't post this. It works a heck of a lot better than the crud Microsoft has arrived at, on computers, tablets and smartphones.
Apple's innovation is simple to summarise: they focus on the user, and do that in a pragmatic way instead of talking a lot about it (which is more the Microsoft way). Thus, FEWER options instead of more, and what is there actually works in a consistent way.
Enjoy the link :).
It is ironic that crApple are screaming to the media when they are the ones being hit up for patent infringments yet they are morte than happy to sue anyone at the drop of a hat for any perceived infingment of one of their patents.
While it is certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black, it should be remembered just how bloody huge that pot is.
Actually old Nokia was 100 times greater inventor(I'm taking about real tech intentions, not "round corner" or "paper bags") than Apple. Nokia's hardware was also way better than Apple or Samsung's. The problem was with software and marketing.
However it's true Nokia, after selling it's phone business hired a company for overseeing it's vast collection of patents and these kinds of companies always trolls other companies. It's their job. Also current Nokia under it's Indian Ceo Rajeev Suri doesn't care about it's past mostly gentleman policies anymore. But they are still probably not worse than self proclaimed inventor Apple when it comes to patent trolling.
The more I think about it, the more I'm intrigued.
Remember when Qualcomm split their chip division with the idea of making sure they got paid, twice?
Instead of Nokia suing Apple, Nokia's offspring sued Apple. Apple saw through this bullshit and sued Nokia directly.
I get it, really. Apple is making trillions off of their phones, Nokia might break even thanks to Google doing most of the work for them. As time passes, Nokia's portable business model will look similar to Microsoft's. Patent-troll-ish...
A phone tax.
Do you really think Nokia can pull off a market upset and not infringe on any Apple IP any better than Samsung and all of China?
I'll bet on peace in the middle east long before I take those odds.
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