US Supremes limit royalty double dippage The US Supreme court has overturned a lower court ruling that let South Korea's LG Electronics double-dip on royalty licensing. In a unanimous decision today, the court favored Taiwan's Quanta Computers, delivering a ruling that will limit a patent holder's ability to collect royalties from companies at different stages of the …
As they say, a hull in the breech is not a breach in the hull. (Cough).
Apart from that, who in his right mind thinks that licensing a patent to someone but them sticking ass-retarded stuff like restrictions on mixing with other technologies onto it should be the basis of an enforceable contract in the first place? Either you sell your monopoly on the problem ... sorry, solution - or you don't.
It looks to me as if LG tried to use a licence agreement to try to extend their rights well beyond that allowed by a Patent. They sold Intel the rights to use a patent within a licence, and used that licence to try to limit the subsequent use of their patent . Bit like someone inventing a new type of window glass and then trying to restrict its use to only those buildings using their bricks.
I hope this is a warning to those companies who will try to use a licence to restrict rights given by law. There are too may who seem to think a licence is a catch-all which supercedes all other patent and copyright laws.
They should have the patent removed for practicing patent abuse.
As in Jammie being done for $220,000 (what's that in real money?) for sharing 24 songs because she shared them with potentially millions of people. Does that mean the redress is now complete? No, they'll try the millions of people that may have shared the 24 songs from her and use the same reasoning for excessive damage there.
Limited only in so far as they can be bothered to continue suing for those same songs.
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