Symantec to cough up $17m after bloody dust-up with patent troll Symantec must pay out $17m after losing a patent infringement battle to IP-hoarding house Intellectual Ventures. A jury in Delaware found in favor of Intellectual Ventures on two of three infringement claims, awarding the biz $8m in damages for one claim and $9m for the other. Symantec was found to have infringed on two …
*sigh*
Have a look at their list of cell phone patents... Yet, they make noting n the cell phone arena.
And they are growing exponentially.
Pretty soon they will be granted the patent for sitting on message boards and posting comments... We will have to pay 5c a letter we type.
Damn you, US Patently Absurd Office.
Did you read the patents? Shakespeare is so old hat - a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for about twelve hours will punch out the complete works of United States Patent Office.
Seriously, you could interpret those patents to cover a someone opening your post for you in the morning ... or even the act of sorting your own e-mail and hitting "delete" or stuffing into the Bayes folders.
Legitimate patent holders often get screwed over by big companies. That's not the same as a patent troll who manages to patent concepts that maybe should not be patentable. The big companies however find it much cheaper to just ignore patents until they get sued and then they pay a token price for their theft. So the reality is there are evil patent trolls and big companies who steal legitimate patented concepts.
The patent system is such a mess it is very difficult even for experienced IP lawyers to know whether a given patent is applicable or not - let alone your typical message board commenter. Since juries decide cases that go to trial, even if all the experts agree on whether a patent is or is not valid in a certain situation, the jury may not agree and that's what counts!
It isn't so much that it pays to ignore patents, but that it is difficult to tell whether the claims will hold up in court or not. If you just license patents whenever companies come knocking claiming to have a legitimate patent and asking you to pay up, you'll spend a lot more money. A lot of patent holders, both trolls and legitimate companies licensing their own IP will seek to get others to license their patents, offering better terms to the initial licensees, then use the "these other companies licensed our patents, so obviously they are legitimate" argument on the rest while asking for more money.
This uncertainty and abuses in the system are why standards processes always require patent licenses under FRAND terms, but that isn't bulletproof as some companies have tried to change the game by charging their percentage 'cut' on the price of an entire device instead of the item (typically a chip in the CE world) that implements the patent. There are also so-called 'submarine' patents where a patent holder that was not involved in a standards process has a patent that was not made public at the time the standard was formed (often deliberately avoiding making it public by repeatedly amending it in minor ways to delay official publication) hoping to cash in by holding up companies implementing that standard after the fact since they won't be bound by FRAND licensing terms.
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