Broadcom sues Netflix for its success: You’re stopping us making a fortune from set-top boxes, moans chip designer Broadcom is suing Netflix for being so successful that people have cut their cable subscriptions and ditched the set-top boxes that make the chip designer a huge profit. In a lawsuit [PDF] filed late last week in California, the San Jose-based Broadcom – which designs and sells chipsets used in millions of set-top boxes – …
Because Alphabet/Google has the financial & legal resources to stick Broadcom into a bucket & fling the stupid into the sun?
Or am I just fantasizing about punishing the incredibly stupid again?
*Deep sigh*
Stupidity should hurt. Intentional Fuckwittery should be lethal.
"the something being cheaper than paying lawyers to litigate things out for 10+years and the guarantee of no further lawsuits from Btoadcom"
Frankly I'm surprised that Google didn't look at this strategy with Hollywood. They could have purchased all the US Studios with money from down the back of the sofa (and still could)
For sure! What a load of bollocks! They might as well sue the cable companies too, because my cable went to streaming only, so now if you want "cable" TV, you just need an internet connection and either a PC, Smart TV, or one of those Fire TV stick type of wireless devices. I watch my cable on an "app" on my PC browser now. I like it MUCH better. No more renting DVRs or other boxes from the cable company.
And all the ThreeLetterAgencies should sue Google for hoovering up all our personal data better than they themselves can...
Oh wait. Nevermind. Forget I said th-
*Impact as I get tackled by a JackBootedThug in SWAT armor & balaklava as they rappell in off a black helicoptor hovering outside my window*
(Obvious different person typing) Nothing to see here. Please move along.
*No Carrier*
To be fair the central point here is patents. Either Broadcom has got patents that Neflix is infringing or not.
I don't think aircraft manufacturers are infringing horse cart makers patents.....
As to whether the patent system is horribly broken..... well for me it's pretty obvious that it is!
Netflix likely uses equipment that contains Broadcom intellectual property, but that should already have been bought and paid for. If not, sue the equipment manufacturers not Netflix.
Horse cart makers to aircraft manufacturers: "Rotating shaft that delivers motive force to transportation vehicle". Pay up!
All that innovation and research yet they somehow managed to miss being Netflix due to clinging to an outdated model based around set top boxes.
Instead it took somebody else without all that emotional baggage to work out how to do "broadcasting" [*] in a way that people wanted to use.
* - if that word even has relevance to a service that lets one stream what they want as and when, it's less "broadcasting" and more "youcasting".
"You brought this bullshit case to me & expect to prevail? You've obviously lost your fucking mind. I brand you & your legal team to be Vexacious Litigants & thus are no longer allowed to file any suit in any court ever again. Do it & we'll jail your worthless asses for contempt of court & practicing law without a license. Bailiff, take these twits out back & make them scrub clean my car with their tongues. I want it spotless. All of it. Engine, undercarriage, boot, bonnet, & especially the ashtray. NEXT! *Gavel bang*"
*Deep sigh*
Damn my fantasies about punishing the stupid...
Sue another company because they innovated and developed a new market, cutting into your dinosaur tech bottom line? How low can they sink?
I really hope that Broadcom's bad faith use of what are more than likely bad patents ends up with them losing huge amounts of money, losing their reputation and ultimately ceasing to exist as a company.
A pathetic law suit from an increasing pathetic company.
"Mr. Ford has caused, and continues to cause, substantial and irreparable harm to the Buggy Whip Entities [that] sell leather equine encouragers used in the carriages that enable traditional transportation services."
But at least the Buggy Whip manufacturers figured out how to migrate to the S&M business.
"The internet and BBS's were developed roughly in parallel."
Yup and then the telcos noticed people making international voip calls for pennies per minute when they were charging dollars per minute for exactly the same thing.
Within a year _EVERY_ major telco was rolling out its own ISP and making plans to shut down the competition (who up to that point were their bestest buddy customers because they bought so much bandwidth and so many phone lines)
A funny thing about anticompetitive behaviour is that once you've destroyed the competition and paid your fine, it doesn't resurrect the hundreds of companies you're quite deliberately driven into bankruptcy (it's very hard to compete with a telco sales rep going to your customers telling them 'you spent this much in line charges dialling into XYZ mom and pop ISP last month. Switch to us and we'll waive the per minute call charges!' - having access to call pattern data they shouldn't be using for that sales pitch, and then offering unlawful sales conditions (free calls to the telco ISP, 4c/min if you dial anyone else) as the bait.)
A lesson learned early on from Firestone Tire company, Standard Oil, General Motors and National Bus Lines....
387 and 663 cover error correction. There may be some merit in these, but a few companies tried patenting Turbo codes for broadcasting some years ago and got their fingers burnt. (That clever bloke from Cambridge who wrote the alternative energy report showed that all Turbo codes were a subset of an existing error correcting scheme.)
283 seems to be a way of efficiently transmitting video encoding data. This may actually be novel.
The rest look rather over-broad, basically how do you get high bandwidth, time-critical stuff over a network. (DVD bitstreams? What?)
Look like typical US patents to me. Not sure this would fly in Europe. DVB standards are all FRAND based. Compression standards are a bit more confusing, because of the sheer number of researchers, overlapping ideas and not everybody agrees to licence stuff as FRAND.
Edit David MacKay was the prof. He showed that LDPC codes (invented/discovered by Gallager in 1960) were a superset of all Turbo codes. This wiped out a promising business model/technical blackmail scam overnight.
My brother used to work for a company who's product was based on what was basically a set top box, he pointed out to the management that they could do everything the box did plus a whole lot more for about a 10th the price if they just switched over to using the Pi as the basis of the product, but they weren't interested at all.
@"spare a few pennies to make the Raspberry Pi possible."
There were many ARM based SOC systems before the PI, where the PI differed was in that it had the full OS accessible for user control/programming rather than just the bare minimum required for system function.
The Pi got in early selling older Broadcom SOCs but it is my opinion that for Broadcom it was the sales of old stock rather than philanthropy that motivated them. One of their employees had the idea of shifting old stock via a charity foundation so they could avoid paying as much tax. It was very successful when you consider that the alternative was to just throw the chips away.
The employee got to run it and I am sure got something in the way of a kick back for the idea and unexpected sales. So yes, Broadcom recognising their employee's efforts in shift old stock on their behalf was nice however, thinking back to the community attempts to reuse rather than throw away old BT Home Hubs based upon Broadcom chips the company did not exactly shine out as being on the consumer or the environment's side. Not to mention their response to requests for the source from their use of OSS components.
In conclusion IMHO Broadcom like every other company is in it for the money, AVAGO ofc are going to do to what every other US company does with IP i.e. sue anyone they can.
... and hardly novel. They also seem to be largely focussed on the transmission of data, which would be the network level, not the application level Netflix operate at. So this really does look like a "rotating shaft" (©zuckzuckgo ; -) )
If and only if they fix every single one of their broken with Kr00k WiFi chip sets.
And when I mean fix, I mean fix the IP, find the old masks, produce the fixed silicon, package it up, test it, and then solder it in place in my broken components, at their expense.
Whatever happened to a "Gentlemans Agreement" ?
Netflix: a Broadcom company. Problem solved!
For that matter, Apple and Samsung could bury the hatchet, agree to share fairly and all would be well.
It seems awfully short sighted to sue your competitor for "stealing" when they are indirectly responsible
for the success of your product(s).
"Netflix: a Broadcom company. Problem solved!"
As has been mentioned, Broadcom got hoovered up by Avago, which was Agilent, which was part of HP's shipmaking division and then the merged outfit changed its name to Broadcom. (SCO bought out then renamed to SCO, etc)
IIRC there was a large amount of VC investment in Avago/Agilent (yup - Silver Lake) - and this always changes the direction of a company towards "Profit as much as possible in as short a period of time as possible and bugger the long-term consequences"
Remember Avago/Agilent went on quite the purchase spree with that VC money, to the point where it started getting slapped down in the USA on monopoly abuse + national security grounds - and is currently under investigation by the EU for anticompetitive behaviour - https://www.wsj.com/articles/broadcom-ordered-by-eu-to-halt-allegedly-anticompetitive-contract-practices-11571221103
That said, it looks like Netflix has enough cash to buy out Broadcom in a hostile takeover if it wanted to.
The principle of packages of content is bad. Just let me pick the content episode by episode, and let me purchase it from anywhere in the world. Like music.
Netflix do add value, because they do smart caching of popular content. If everyone is watching the new James Bond, it makes sense to avoid a point to point flow from MGM to each home.
Lets get back to the original Netflix rent a DVD model. Item by Item. No box. No recurring charges.
A clear separation of the deliver system from the product beling delivered.
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