back to article Luxembourg patent troll suing world+dog

Another patent troll has appeared on the horizon: Enterprise Systems Technologies, armed with a handful of patents originally assigned to Siemens, has taken out the sueball machine-gun and fired off shots at Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, Amazon, and Audience. The Luxembourg-headquartered company has filed the lawsuits in Delaware …

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  1. Don Jefe

    Perfect Opportunity

    This is all the reason necessary to excise the malignant tumor that is Luxembourg and demonstrate to others the folly of insular society. Just so there's no confusion here, I believe the best, the only, course of action is to completely and utterly destroy that festering anal wart called Luxembourg. I propose a traditional method of nation scale annihilation where we will drive an endless procession of cattle across the country, flattening everything and shitting on everything else. We solve the 'Luxembourg Problem' once and for all, as well as send a message to patent trolls anywhere cows may be found. Death to Luxembourg!

    1. dan1980

      Re: Perfect Opportunity

      Couldn't you just excise Delaware? (And East Texas, of course.)

      The 'shitting on everything' tactic does sound distinctly American, though.

      1. Mark 85
        Mushroom

        Re: Perfect Opportunity

        Oh hell.... take the American approach and nuke all three. Since we're taking names and about kick butt, any other places that need to be added to the list

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Perfect Opportunity

      excise the malignant tumor that is Luxembourg

      This has been tried by national-socialists with mixed success and is being tried by socialists and "liberals" from France and Germany at repeat intervals.

      But yes, having a country that allows a ultra-low-low VAT level of 15% to even exist (which is patently unfair to countries which need to make do with 20% VAT or higher) and banks for which one actually needs to have a warrant before probing of bank accounts may begin is totally inimical to the idea of pan-socialistic Yurop.

      Luxembourg has also good points: they often openly fellate officals from USA and Yuropocrats from other Yuropean capitals, and try very hard to be "down with the kids", launching themselves into totally retarded taxpayer-funded glory projects which come a cropper. So there is hope yet.

      They also host AWACS and the tomb of general Patton IIRC.

      1. Matt 21

        Re: Perfect Opportunity

        So, there's a problem with the American patent system so we should bomb Luxembourg?

        Are you, by chance, American yourself?

        1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

          There is no problem that cannot be solved by the application of sufficient firepower.

          Not in the US anyways.

    3. Grikath

      Re: Perfect Opportunity

      You disappoint me Don Jefe.. You're proposing to bomb a poor old grandma whose only "crime" is to maintain a mail address and forward anything sent to that mailbox to a given address, thus adding to her pension and giving her some cash to buy her grandchildren some goodies. It's one of Luxembourg's main national industries, the country is too small to do much of anything else.

      A person of your stature should at least be able to trace the maze of interconnected shell companies behind the official entity, and deploy the Wrath of God™ swiftly and decisively on the real spider in the web.

      1. Don Jefe

        Re: Perfect Opportunity

        You misunderstand, I just need a reason to raze Luxembourg. There's someone there who won't come out, and they won't let me back in after last time. So, in keeping with long accepted traditions, I'm proposing using the flimsiest of pretexts to justify my entirely self centered needs by citing 'public good' as the motivator for my actions. Success in any endeavor is largely a function of recognizing opportunities, and this is a rather unique opportunity I would hate to miss out on. I'm more than happy to donate the cattle afterward. If you catch it yourself you won't have to worry about any horse sneaking into your dinner.

        No amount of cattle will fix the US patent system. Contrary to what politicians and 'business leaders' tell you, piling more bullshit onto an enormous pile of bullshit won't help anything. Software, 'machine instructions' I think is my preferred term, as that includes embedded stuff, have to be removed from the standard patent system altogether. Build a parallel system for software, or don't, it's irrelevant as long as software is out of the general system.

        Capping damages is the second component. If malpractice and faulty medical devices, that result in death and royally fucked up lives, can have damage caps, then a headphone jack, or whatever should have caps as well. Capping damages is nice because the maximum can be set high enough to encourage small inventors but not be worth a full force corporate offensive. As it stands now there's zero chance of small entities winning an enormous settlement anyway. They simply don't have the resources to pursue it. But a $2m, or some 'reasonable' amount is about $1,950,000 more than most individual inventors will ever get from their patents anyway. So everybody wins, except the trolls, and fuck them.

        Luxembourg can still do the right thing though. I know they're listening and I know they know who I want. It's not too late.

        1. dan1980

          Re: Perfect Opportunity

          "No amount of cattle will fix the US patent system.

          Sage words as always, Don.

        2. John Tserkezis

          Re: Perfect Opportunity

          "No amount of cattle will fix the US patent system."

          Australia and New Zealand have plenty of sheep. We could loan those if that'll help.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The hands-free telephone patent…

    sounds to me like it's discussing the noise cancellation feature of the phone rather than it purely being "hands free". i.e. using multiple microphones to detect the background noise, then using a phasing network to cancel it out.

    Something that is done in a lot more places than just mobile phones.

  3. Shadow Systems

    A cheaper solution...

    Take the Patent Troll out front of the courthouse, describe their Crimes Against Humanity, then put bullets through their heads. Repeat it for the people/company(ies) in prosecuting the issue, including Councel, and then mulch the corpses into the nearest compost heap.

    Do this for all Patent Trolls, their legal team, and keep doing it until there's none left to infect the populace.

    Samuel Clements ("Mark Twain") said to kill all the lawyers, so why not add Patent Trolls to the hit list?

    /Sarcasm?

    *Cough*

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Mushroom

      Re: A cheaper solution...

      An even cheaper and much more permanent solution would be to remove the USPTO in its entirety and declare ALL US patents null and void.

    2. Richard Taylor 2

      Re: A cheaper solution...

      "Samuel Clements ("Mark Twain") said to kill all the lawyers, so why not add Patent Trolls to the hit list?"

      Our boy Willy got there first

      All:

      God save your majesty!

      Cade:

      I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat

      and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,

      that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

      Dick:

      The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

      Cade:

      Nay, that I mean to do.

      Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78

    3. John Gamble

      Re: A cheaper solution...

      Samuel Clements ("Mark Twain") said to kill all the lawyers, ...

      No, he didn't.

      This isn't the weirdest mis-attribution to Twain I've seen, but it has to have been the easiest to have checked. It's not like Google couldn't find the quote.

  4. Dazed and Confused
    Flame

    How the hell

    Did any of these things get patented?

    Least cost routing? Sorry that's been around since Bell first invented the damn phone. Certainly the companies I worked for back in the 80s all used least cost routing in their automatic exchanges, so these all significantly pre-date those patents.

    Hands free? oh you mean speaker phones. How long have they been around for? decades?

    Even on mobiles, car phones had this option back when handhelds were little more than a car phone and car battery.

    Will someone please do something about patent offices issuing patents when there is so much prior art around.

    Perhaps we should introduce a new rule that any company that applies for a patent when there is published prior art automatically has every single one of their patents invalidated.

    Preferably the patent office that issues one when there is prior art should have every patent they issued within a year also invalidated. This way businesses would bring pressure to bare on the patent offices to do their job properly rather than simply allowing anyone to patent anything and passing it on to the courts to clear up the resulting mess

    1. Martin
      Headmaster

      Re: How the hell

      ...businesses would bring pressure to BEAR...

      But you've had an upvote for the sentiments.

    2. Grikath

      Re: How the hell

      "Did any of these things get patented?"

      Simples... Apple has almost made a career out of it: $[text] + "on a mobile device". Rinse, repeat. The USPTO will stamp it. Lawyers will cackle with glee and plan their next expansion to their mansion.

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: How the hell

      Perhaps - and this is just a suggestion - you should try reading the damn patents and not just assuming you know what they say based on three-word summaries in a Reg article.

      It's entirely possible that all the patents describe techniques with prior art or that are obvious to a practitioner. I don't know; in this case I haven't taken the time to read them myself. But this commentard business of "patent examiners are idiots and I know these patents are invalid because I recognize a phrase" is nothing more than a way to parade your own intellectual laziness.

  5. tojb

    Remember when MS decided to retro-patent vFAT? And how that seemed like a massive obstacle to developing mobile electronic devices such as MP3 players? People got around it somehow. Whatever solution was adopted in that case should also work out for the impedence-sensing jack, for instance. Can anyone remember what the answer was to the vFAT issue?

    1. big_D Silver badge

      The answer was to buy a licence from Microsoft...

      1. tojb

        Their motives probably weren't as simple as making money by selling licences. It had the hallmarks of an attempt to defeat open standards on portable devices, facilitating a walled garden approach, back when they thought their garden might have more than one or two vegetables in it......

    2. heyrick Silver badge

      vFAT

      If you mean the long filenames thing, it typically used a wrinkle that in the patent, a long filename was a long version of a short 8.3 filename. So the workaround was to have a long filename and a bogus 8.3 name. An absolutely horrid "hack" (what happens on LFN incapable devices?), but that's reality...

      http://www.osnews.com/story/21766/Linux_Kernel_Patch_Works_Around_Microsoft_s_FAT_Patents

      1. tojb

        Re: vFAT

        slaps forehead.... of course. It should always be easy to work around something that was just a hack in the first place. :-D I'm glad that they were wasting their own time as well as everyone else's.

  6. hplasm
    FAIL

    Just say no.

    Trolling the big boys- if the big boys say no, what are you gonna do?

    Sue?

    What if they don't pay? Stop them selling?

    Once the customers get riled up, you are toast.

    You are in Luxembourg, not China...

  7. Medixstiff

    I have an idea.

    Why don't Apple with their hundred odd billion in excess cash and Google, throw some money at a few US Senators and have these patent trolls marked as economic terrorists, stifling innovation and only good for a decent questioning session out Guantanamo bay way?

    1. Dazed and Confused

      Re: I have an idea.

      Because Apply are the worlds biggest patent trolls.

      The surprising thing is only that Apple aren't suing the patent trolls for using their favourite business practice. Surely they must have managed to patent that business process by now.

      1. Sean Timarco Baggaley

        Re: I have an idea.

        @Dazed and Confused:

        Apple have been the *targets* of the world's biggest patent trolls for years.

        Apple do also *protect their own patents*, like every other business*, but unlike a patent troll, Apple make actual products. Patent trolls, by definition, do not.

        (I'm also sure someone's thinking about cracking the tiresome "rectangles with rounded corners" bollocks. Please don't. In fact, I strongly suggest you read up on the legal concept of Trade Dress. It's the same reason why you can't call your soft drink "Kooky-Kola" and slavishly duplicate Coca-Cola's own swirly font style and colours. So every time anyone cracks that non-joke, all they're doing is displaying their ignorance.)

        * (The law requires businesses do their own policing. The government doesn't do it for you. Naturally, lawyers love to litigate as that's how they get paid, so don't expect this to change any time soon.)

        1. Don Jefe

          Re: I have an idea.

          Sean with the really long name is correct, the big time patent trolls aren't anyone most people have ever heard of. The Apple vs Samsung, MS vs Red Hat (or whatever) get so much traction in the press because those issues are just extensions of the Ford vs Chevy debates that people seem to enjoy. The stories are perfect for the click driven press because the emotions of the reader are the only part that matters.

          But the trolling that really screws up the system for everyone is that done by law firms disguised as holding companies and small hedge funds. Those cases don't get press because they are boring as shit and have approximately zero emotional value. But being boring doesn't change the money and practices of those involved. As a good general rule, it's fairly safe to assume that any big brand doing something means that something has been being done by faceless companies for a very long time.

    2. Dan Paul

      Re: I have an idea. (Because....)

      They already did that to Samsung?

  8. sniperpaddy

    Non-Practising Entities: USE IT OR LOSE IT

    Patent Trolls violate the original spirit of patents.

    .

    (1) Non-practicing entities should lose the right to enforce a patent; USE IT OR LOSE IT !!!

    (obviously with the exception of the original inventor).

    .

    (2) Similar to hardware patents, software patents should only cover the method, not the result.

    (if software patent logic was applied to the Wright Brother's airplane, the trolls would be able to sue Boeing for their 747).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Non-Practising Entities: USE IT OR LOSE IT

      "Similar to hardware patents, software patents should only cover the method, not the result."

      Which copyright already does for software; hence there is no need for software patents.

      However, monopoly patents (to use their full name) have outlived their social usefulness and should all be scraped, hard or soft.

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: Non-Practising Entities: USE IT OR LOSE IT

      Easier response : let the trolls have their patents and lawsuits, but index the damages on the amount of income the patent-holder makes from selling objects that use said patent.

      In that scenario, patent trolls which make nothing and sell nothing will see that any court action will result in zero rewards, since they do not make anything. And if they don't sell much, meaning they are not in the business of actually making money from the patent, then they don't get much either.

      1. Peter Simpson 1
        Thumb Up

        Re: Non-Practising Entities: USE IT OR LOSE IT

        ...index the damages on the amount of income the patent-holder makes from selling objects that use said patent.

        I like that. But average the income over the three (five, seven) years previous to the filing of the suit.

        That way, they can't claim they were just about to make a profit...

    3. Dazed and Confused
      Flame

      Re: Non-Practising Entities: USE IT OR LOSE IT

      You can define "patent troll" as "Non-Practising Entities:" if you like.

      Me, I define anyone who thinks that patenting things like slide to unlock or bouncing menus as a patent troll.

    4. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Non-Practising Entities: USE IT OR LOSE IT

      (1) Non-practicing entities should lose the right to enforce a patent; USE IT OR LOSE IT !!!

      Yes, this idea is a favorite among hoi polloi, no matter how often people who are capable of critical thinking point out that it's stupid.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    why not do an IBM on them

    and patent the process for trolling itself...

  10. Identity
    FAIL

    Mistake

    They SHOULD have filed in Texas. Delaware, (in)famously corporate-friendly, probably won't support this kind of shenanigans...

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