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back to article Apple engineers 'pay no attention to anyone's patents', court told

Apple must pay software biz VirnetX $368m after a court ruled FaceTime video calls infringed VirnetX's patents. The fruity firm was on the hook for as much as $900m, but a jury awarded a lower payout during a Texas court hearing yesterday evening, according to VirnetX's lawyers McKool Smith. The jury, which had sat through …

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    1. Marshalltown
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Down

      Re: If they do not, then they are negligent

      Written like a patent lawyer, or someone who thinks their ideas are unique and important because they occurred in close physical association with their personal cerumen. The fact is, not chasing down someone-else's delusions of intellectual grandeur on file at the patent office bolsters the legal argument that the solution was obvious. That can then be hauled out when some troll tries to pirate the work based upon the obscure language of a patent.

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  3. Ted Treen
    Flame

    It appears...

    ...that without joining the brouhaha over what is and what isn't a valid patent, that not only is the US patent system intrinsically broken, but US patent attorneys have all the morals of hyenas, and the Texas Patent Courts seem to exist in some peculiar little space warp of their own, frequently making decisions which completely fly in the face of logic and rational thought.

    I recall Goldman Sachs being described in Rolling Stone as "...a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

    They must be related to Patent Lawyers - the resemblance is unmistakeable.

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  4. JaitcH
    Thumb Up

    Apple needs new legal talent

    Apple's lawyers seem to be on a losing streak.

    How many other patents are out there that have been stolen by Apple, along with the company name and logo?

    4 3
    1. dssf
      Reply Icon

      Re: Apple needs new legal talent... how many more losses...

      Before more bites are part of Apple's logo?

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    2. cyke1
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: Apple needs new legal talent

      Anyone that thinks apple comes up with everything themselves and never steals idea's you are a complete idiot. "Good artists copy great artists steal. - Steve Jobs" Quote from Steve Job's, its pretty self explanatory.

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      1. Ben Tasker
        Reply Icon
        Happy

        Re: Apple needs new legal talent

        IIRC (in a bar in Barcelona so not wasting time looking it up) that quote wasn't even original! Someone else said it first

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        1. Nick L
          Reply Icon

          Re: Apple needs new legal talent

          I think that's sort of the point... Picasso/Banksy...

          http://beinglorious.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/artists-jpg.gif?w=500&h=449

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        2. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Apple needs new legal talent

          "Someone else said it first"

          But Steve Jobs acknowledged this and applied it to Apple ... the full quote is:

          “Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

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  5. peter 45
    Trollface

    yeh but

    These were for patents for making things work, and are therefore worthless. Now if they were patents for makings pretty, that would be different.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The problem is Apple is such a big and rich target for patent trolls.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      The problem is Apple is such a big and rich target for patent troll.

      Fixed it for you

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        @AC 15:31GMT - Actually Apple is both at the same time.

        And they are not alone.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    difference between Infringed and Willingly Infringed

    If a real big some when it comes to damages.

    some 30+ years ago I had a patent granted to me. I was told by the Patent Lawyers in no uncertain terms NOT to go looking for Prior Art of is what I was proposing was already covered by someone else's patent. If I did do this and found some prior art and then went ahead and udsed the design in a product we would have been guilty of willingly infringing the patents. That would have meant far higher damages.

    btw, I never got any royalties from the patent, technoloty moved on and what it covered was obsolete not long after the patent was granted.

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    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: difference between Infringed and Willingly Infringed

      Then you were badly advised.

      When you submit a patent you swear that it doesn't violate any other patent that you know of.

      Trying to claim in court that you didn't know it violated a patent because you deliberately didn't search is like a doctor claiming they knew of no side effects to a drug because they deliberately didn't read the label.

      Good luck with that one.

      Engineers being told not to read patents is the exact opposite argument. They aren't expected to be experts in the field of the invention and what is prior art - but you are.

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      1. Ben Tasker
        Reply Icon
        Joke

        Re: difference between Infringed and Willingly Infringed

        What about there was no prior art because it wouldn't run on the CPU I'm using and so wasn't interchangeable

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nobody should ever pay any attention to any patents, why limit your creativity and potential?

    It's not the job of a designer or engineer to worry about such things. Let the lawyers and management worry about that.

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    1. dssf
      Reply Icon

      But, what if one is an independent inventor or artist,

      And cannot afford a lawyer or team? With the existence of "free online patents" or the like, there is NO excuse to fal to make cursory searches and at least document them. Then, work likehel to design AROUND the cockblocking patent, just to ensure trolls cannot feed, and legit patents do not obstruct tech inovation.

      That a risk of finding of willful infringement can treble the cost of damages does not change that you can design around assholic companies and win if your target audience is not theirs, or if you can render their patent obsolete or even invalid simply by actively searching for prior art.

      Failing to search for prior art is like refusing to accept that one's design may be flawed, and is like wilfully tapdancing in a minefield, or like sleeping in a snakepit outside of instead of inside a glass cage.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        @dssf - Re: But, what if one is an independent inventor or artist,

        A patent lawsuit is not about who is right. It is about who has better lawyers and who will have better luck in convincing the jury. Just spend some time reading court documents showing how lawyers from both sides are bringing the patent matter to a jury and see how much is spend on analyzing the patent in question and how much time is spent on collateral fighting.

        Samsung had prepared some examples of prior art to show to the jury but the judge was persuaded by Apple lawyers that this is not appropriate. So searching for prior art does not prevent you from going to the trial and stand there at the mercy of a jury but it gives the plaintiff's lawyer an opportunity to picture you as a villain having no respect for other people work. There's a 50% chance the jury might fall for that and you might have to pay 1 billion.

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    2. JEDIDIAH
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Corrupted until it's unrecognizable

      The whole point of patents is to improve the state of the arts. The body of patents should be the first thing that practicioners go to to find resuable solutions to hard problems. Instead, the current regime encourages patents to be ignored and to be written in such a way that they are worthless. Patents are supposed to be documentation for other engineers like peer reviewed journals or text books.

      Of course they are nothing of the sort anymore. They have been corrupted to the point where they are completely unrecognizable.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BUT

    Who now owns rectangles with rounded edges?

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  10. Phil Atkin

    "ignore all patents ... "

    I'd say in my experience that this is absolutely standard practice - engineers are instructed to never attempt to perform any patent prior art research, if an infringement comes up it's the job of legal to sort it out. So Apple are no better or worse than anyone else.

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    1. Greg J Preece
      Reply Icon

      Re: "ignore all patents ... "

      So Apple are no better or worse than anyone else.

      Except for that whole "massive hypocrites" part.

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  11. DrXym

    PGPfone et al

    Computers have been capable of setting up secure connections between each other from the time networks and encrypted have existed.

    There is nothing novel about this and indeed it has been extended to voice and video calls numerous times. Too numerous to count. For example PGPfone was conceived in 1995 for similar purposes of secure communication. Maybe Apple used some other transport over TCP/IP but as far as I'm concerned that's basically implementation noise - it's been around for a long time.

    It disgusts me that the patent system can be so abused like this. While there is a certain schadenfreud when Apple gets whacked, the reality is these patent trolls are parasites and IP law could be changed to strongly discourage the practice, e.g. limiting damages for submarine patents, providing courts the powers to penalise the trolls by reducing patent lifespans and so on.

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  12. Steve I
    Joke

    Don't Samsung...

    pay meticulous attention to Apple's patents and call it R&D?

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  13. tom dial Silver badge
    Linux

    Question

    After looking at the patent, I conclude it is mostly a patent on using a DNS server for something else in addtion. And it clearly is a patent on doing something as much as or more than on a method for doing something. I can't decide, however, whether TOR is prior art or infringes it; and similarly for FreeSWAN. Opinions?

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  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    <rant>Isn't it time to recognise that the whole software patent system is flawed? Abandon the idea that IDEAS can be patented for software and copyright the implementation. Most of these companies haven't actually ever implemented the patents they hold, and many of them are SOOO obvious to everyone except the patent lawyers and the courts (and well picked jurors) that we can all but laugh and say.. "they got a patent for THAT?!?!"

    </rant>

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  15. etabeta
    FAIL

    Surely not an Apple fan but.....

    The entire US patent system must be redone, and the first that must go are those software patents. The system must also not leave any space for the trolls.

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  16. Bigg Phill

    Software patents have to go

    As a US judge pointed out, patents work in pharmaceuticals when the odds of someone coming up with the same molecular formula are huge.

    However patenting software might as well be patenting maths. It's pointless and does nothing for either the industry or the consumer. It does keep a lot of lawyers in jobs though

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  17. takuhii

    That is the best Law Firm name I have ever come across!! "McKool Smith"

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