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back to article Apple hoards LTE patents to deflect Samsung attack

Apple has been hoarding LTE patents in a bid to head off a possible legal attack from fierce rival Samsung on its forthcoming iPhone 5, according to reports from Korea. Apple has gone from holding zero LTE patents last year to having 318 filed away today. That's around five per cent of the world’s total, today, the Korea …

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: How many patents???

      Given the fact that patent offices don't seem to bother with prior art I wouldn't be surprised if 2000 of them just cover various wordings of "allowing the human voice to be transmitted between two devices over a long distance"

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    2. JetSetJim
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Re: How many patents???

      Go to www.3gpp.org and read them. At the radio interface, just one protocol doc (RRC - TS 36.331) is a 1,000+page of dense technical gobbledegook. Then there's all the other LTE protocol layers to consider - both at the radio layer and in between different network nodes.

      Yes, a lot of it is based off of UMTS (3G) standards, but each of the infrastructure/handset vendors put a lot of effort into working out every last nuance of the protocol, and each essential patent can cover just one of those tiny nuances. There's a website somewhere (buried in the ITU one, I think) that allows you to work out how many essential patents there are (as declared by each company). 6,000 patents isn't many, when you consider all that - although I wonder how many essential patents for LTE are carried forward from UMTS.

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      1. JetSetJim
        Reply Icon

        Re: How many patents???

        Meh - the IPR database sits in the ETSI site:

        http://ipr.etsi.org/SearchIPRD.aspx

        There's an "industry analysis" here, also: http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/09/04/2012090400833.html?ystfuv

        The stuff that Apple got from Nortel might not have much value, but the stuff they got from Freescale might be a bit more valuable.

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      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        @JetSetJim - Re: How many patents???

        So, if each of those 6000 patents is FRAND and it requires a payment of let's say a reasonable 0.1% from the final price of the phone, that will add up to 600% - you must keep breathing, please! Then you still have to pay for the non-essential square-with-rounded-corners patents and so on. Then you'd better put aside some money for an unforeseen patent infringement lawsuit brought to you courtesy of a troll who couldn't be bothered to publish the list of patents it owns. Now can Mr. patent-lover Orlowski come up to explain us how is this going to encourage a phone manufacturer to come up with new models and keep doing its business instead of just milking the world+dog Microsoft style with the patents it already owns ?

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        1. JetSetJim
          Reply Icon

          Re: @JetSetJim - How many patents???

          Not all of those patents will impact the phone, for a start, but your point will still stand as the bulk of them will be in that arena. It mostly makes it difficult for new entrants to get into the market as the patent piles are, in general, traded between the players (e.g. Samsung says to Nokia "you can use these 500 patents if I can use those 500", but probably a bit more detailed than that) so the existing players probably end up paying less than 600% of the phone cost (assuming 0.1% of final phone "value" is a fair licensing term - I don't know the limits of FRAND). This basically means that the existing players are encouraged to come up with as big a pile of patents as possible to be used in this trading process (so there's some innovation there) while they are working towards writing the new standards.

          Overall, I am not sure what the cost might be as a "tech start up", with nothing but a pile of cash and a desire to make a decent phone, to license the entire essential patent pool just so the phone will work with the various disparate networks (GSM, UMTS, HSPA, LTE) out there. Certainly the cost of some of the chipsets that are out there include that licensing cost, which probably accounts for a lot of the patents (but that's just my unproven assertion based on working in the industry without ever seeing pricing of such things). My rough understanding of one of the Apple-Google/Motorola disputes is that Googorola licensed the FRAND stuff to the chipset manufacturer who then sold on to Apple. Apple claimed that gave them a license, Moto disagreed (I've got no idea who is correct in this disagreement, or even if I've got the right end of the stick in describing it).

          Or, sticking a mock-Fandroid hat on, you can just implement the standards in a new phone (they're well documented, after all) and not bother to enter negotiations for FRAND licensing - just sell the phone while patenting the non-essential, non-FRAND-liable things that make your new shiny special despite them being either obvious or otherwise trivial (or even already implemented in others devices) - and then abuse the legal system to throw your weight around and get market share while not really contributing to innovation in the standards. </iExtremism>

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Another flo-job

    Why serve as a mouthpiece for this guy.?

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is just ridiculous. No wonder the endless legal battles go on.

    Apple didn't invent LTE and they didn't invent mobile phones.

    How the hell can there be hundreds of patents available for just making an LTE capable phone?

    It is just STUPID!

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  4. g e
    Holmes

    What it presumably shows

    Is that apple know Samsung (in this case) have grounds to sue them and are expecting it. Presumably for not stumping up IP cash. Again.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: What it presumably shows

      Would that be the IP cash that was already paid to the Intel/Infineon, who had already licensed the patents? You Sametards are always way too loose with the facts.

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  5. Glostermeteor

    *sigh*.......how very sad that all our tech companies are focusing on lawyers and not technological innovation, they all need to seriously grow up. The moment that a court strikes down all these ridiculous patents that limit innovation and advancement the better off we'll all be. If Tim Berners-Lee had patented the World Wide Web instead of giving it away for the good of humanity, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and others would not even exist, if only they would follow his example.....

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Apple needs some help

    The latest thing the Apple v Samsung foreman said is that they NEVER CON SIDERED THE VAILIDITY OF THE APPLE PATENTS

    http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120904190933195

    This is not admissable evidence, unfortunately, but I am sure Samsung can use that when seeking to get the verdict set aside.

    And should be pointed out to the self-0righteous Apple fanbois for whom Apple is the only source, apparently, of innovation

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    1. Steve Todd
      Reply Icon
      Stop

      Re: Apple needs some help

      You're really going to have to read wider than Groklaw if you want to understand the Samsung-Apple case properly. The jury DID consider the validity of all of the patents in question (both Apple's and Samsung's) and decided that both sets of patents were valid, but only Apple's patents were infringed. This has been made clear in multiple interviews.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Apple still needs needs some help

        Go to the horse's mouth

        "Demon-Xanth:

        Did you have the opportunity to ask "Is this something that should be patentable?" during the trial?"

        Velvin Hogan @Demon-Xanth

        "No, however it was not the function of this jury to ask that. We were bound to use the law as it is today. The patents were issued the judge instructed us not to second guess the current patent system. "

        The foreman says it, they did not question the validity of the patents

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        1. Steve Todd
          Reply Icon
          Stop

          Re: Apple still needs needs some help

          Part of the defence of each company was that the patents of the other weren't valid for assorted reasons (prior art being the obvious one). The jury had to decide if those arguments were valid or not, but not to consider the philosophical question of patentability. The assumption was that, under the current rules, the patent was grant-able but could be invalidated with the right evidence.

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        2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Facepalm

          Re: Apple still needs needs some help

          > "No, however it was not the function of this jury to ask that. We were bound to use the law as it is today.

          Doesn't know what a jury is about.

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    2. Arclight
      Reply Icon

      Re: Apple needs some help

      Wanhang:

      Why did you choose to ignore prior art despite it being a legitimate claim?

      Velvin Hogan @Wanhang

      I is not ignore prior art yes it was legitimate, however it was not interchangeable therefore it did not invalidate Apples patents....Under the current law the prior art must be among other things interchangeable. the prior art sighted even Samsung does not currently use. Read the law and the statues covering Prior art.

      For someone who claims to know what he's talking about in such cases, he might want to learn the difference between 'sighted' and 'cited'

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      1. tom dial Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Apple needs some help

        Mr. Hogan's statement, if properly quoted, suggests he holds himself an expert on patent law and possibly claimed that during jury discussions. If I recall the Judge's instructions from my own jury experience, that would be serious misbehavior indeed.

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    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Apple needs some help

      Since the validity of the patents was central to the entire case, were the jury properly directed if, as their foreman states, they did not consider the validity of the patents?

      It's a flipping joke, quite frankly.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Apple needs some help

        Yes. The nury instructions made it clear that the jury as to consider the validity of the Apple patents.

        Instead, they seem to have gone

        - the patents were granted therefore are valid

        - do the Samsung products cross over with Apple

        If so then Samsung us guilty

        Even on the crossover the jury seems to have screwed up

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Apple needs some help

          US education comes out of this looking worse than either party to the case.

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  7. Andrew Lobban
    WTF?

    5%

    To be fair, if Apple have 5% of the LTE patents then i'd hardly class that as hoarding. What percentage do Nokia have, Samsung, Google, Microsoft etc.

    Also, how the hell can there be 6000 patents on LTE?! Surely that should be a standard and not patentable at all??

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    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: 5%

      Surely that should be a standard and not patentable at all??

      Lots of standards depend on patents but I guess it's an indication of how much recent court cases have skewed the debate.

      Done correctly standards encourage patent owners to pool their resources and, therefore their patents, to ensure interoperability. This is, after all, why patents are supposed to exist: not for hoarding but for sharing. This has worked very well with the GSM shepherded development of mobile phone technology which is has emerged as the dominant standard around the world - other forms were manufacturer-driven and usually limited to individual markets. Interoperability was mandated by the EU as a requirement for mobile phone networks. The standards allowed manufacturers to get a fair return on the work they put into essential parts of the standard, they earn a tiny cut but on every device in a growing market, without pricing other companies completely out of the market.

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  8. Joe K

    Apple and Samsung

    If Samsung really wanted to hurt Apple wouldn't they just stop making their central iOS processors and stop supplying flash chips?

    That'd fuck up Apple's entire business overnight. Cutting off your nose to spite your face, sure, but i think they're beyond common sense now.

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    1. J. R. Hartley
      Reply Icon

      Re: Apple and Samsung

      I doubt it would be that simple unfortunately.

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    2. Kebablog
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: Apple and Samsung

      Samsung stop supplying one of their largest customers - yeah that would be a good decision.

      1 1
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this a workable move by Samsung?

    Essentially they'll be suing Apple for reselling a Broadcom chip. Surely Apple can then claim it's not they who are infringing.

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  10. Tom 7

    I guess this means Apple are running scared

    Since Mueller is a paid shill I guess Apple are paying him to try and head Samsung off.

    He's got a pretty good record of being completely and utterly wrong all the time so I guess Apple should be running scared if they didn't pay him

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  11. Dave 15

    Patents once again being used for ill

    Basically if we are to have any consumer choice for devices to connect to each other then we need standards not patents. The current patent situation means we must inevitably end up with a beta vs vhs type scenario, and eventually we will probably end up with second best.

    Patents were a good idea when used to protect real ground breaking ideas. Now they are used to keep other people from implementing compatible equipment.

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  12. ukgnome
    Stop

    perspective people, please

    We won't be getting 4G in the UK for a while (except in certain experimental Orange areas).

    Hardly going to shape the products of the UK

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  13. DEAD4EVER
    Stop

    stuff apple

    all I can say is stuff america and apple as long as those phones are available in the EU ie UK for me then i am happy to help increase android even further its the best OS ever period. we don't need america and there stupid patent crap anyway hell if I wanted to I could buy half a dozen android phones to rub it in lol. don't care what apple do in the future I will never touch any of there products I am sure I can find a cheaper alternative that works just as well if not better least I wont be locked down and forced to use crappy iTunes. oh yea all those sad apple fan boy idiots will cue up outside apple stores just to get a iPhone 5 thinking its the best phone ever which in fact its playing catch up, Samsung is no 1 end of and apple freaks cant admit it cause there so blind they cant see past that apple logo. io6 wont amke any difference it will be the same os with maybe some fixes that will be it. it will be the same old dated OS since the 3g and 3gs.

    5 8
    1. Toothpick
      Reply Icon
      Stop

      Re: stuff apple

      I'm sure you posted practically the same in another thread.

      Can anyone translate because trying to read this is really hard going

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: stuff apple

        That's what you get when when you let intellectually challenged people loose with a keyboard.

        3 3
      2. Steve Todd
        Reply Icon

        Re: stuff apple

        Best as I can figure out it translates as :

        RANT, RAGE, I HATE APPLE.

        Anyone who buys the iPhone 5 is stupid, I'm going to prove this by buying half a dozen Android phones.

        It doesn't answer the question of why you would want half a dozen Android phones or why decently specced devices are little if any cheap than the iPhone.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: stuff apple

      Learn to write. It's ironic that you call others 'idiots'.

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  14. Mark .

    So where was this guy's advice when Apple decided to force Samsung's products out the market? His comments make sense for a fair market, but sorry, the patent war has already started.

    Where have things been made worse for Apple? Where is the antitrust response?

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  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    El Reg, Take 1000 lines

    Florian Meuller is not a Patent Expert. He is a paid for shill.

    Repeat this 1000 times and then go stand on the 'naughty step'.

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  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The patent system is fundamentally flawed.

    The patent system is fundamentally flawed.

    In 99% of the cases it doesn't help the inventors. It only serves big corporations to bully smaller competitors.

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  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Surely it's sufficient for the wireless chipset maker (qualcomm etc.) to license the 'technology' that Apple and others put in their phones...?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Unless we are talking about Motorola and Samsung

      ... both of who think exhaustion and FRAND obligations don't apply to them and that they can ignore this with respect to Apple. Samsung lost in court on this point, Motorola is being investigated.

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  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dear Apple,

    Thanks you for your recent order for chips and assorted components for your new iTWAT device, unfortunately due to recent legal expenses we have had to increase the price of our goods. This slight increase on your order equates to a mere $1billion, I trust you will find this reasonable as we have read that you recently acquired a small windfall courtesy your friend Mr Hogan.

    Yours

    Samsung

    2 1
  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Florian Mueller

    Citing Florian Mueller is a clear indicator of insufficient sources and effectively undermines your credibility.

    He has a strong (personal and paid) agenda and a poor track record in his "they are not predictions".

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  20. Lord Lien
    Joke

    Just warning you all but ........

    ......... My gold plated butt-plug business is being sued by Apple.

    Apparently they have a patent for overpriced crap for arseholes.

    Sorry if this has been posed before.... some one emailed me it today & it amused me no end ;)

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  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Patent and copyright is just (institutionalised) cronyism

    The whole idea of patents and copyright should be abolished.

    If you invent a super new gizmo or write a brilliant novel/piece of fabulous music and you don't want anybody to steal it then you should keep it secret. The moment you publicise your gizmo or publish your manscript/ play your song in public it should be in the public domain.

    Monopoly patents were granted by the monarch to people who did him favours/paid him gold.

    Patents have no place in a free market and stifle true innovation because they raise barriers to entry.

    As for the claims that stuff wouldn't be invented/written if it wasn't for the protection offered by patents etc. this is rubbish. Edison (and others) invented the light bulb because the time was right, if he had kept the idea secret, someone else would have (did) invented it.

    Counterfeiting is fraud and should be dealt with in the criminal courts.

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  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The network operators have to get their two cents in here somehow since they are on the other end of the LTE link. T-mobile doesn't cater to the iphone(they are doing very well without Apple) so they have no need to use any of Apple's patents. When T-Mobile gets their LTE network going, Samsung has everything to gain.

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