Jury reckons Motorola wasn't 'fair and reasonable' to Microsoft Microsoft has said that a Washington jury had agreed with its claim that Google-owned Motorola had broken its promises to standards-setting bodies to license its standards-essential patents at fair and reasonable rates. The jury awarded Redmond $14m in damages, around half of what it had asked for. Most of this, $11m, is to …
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No... wait... Microsoft is estimated to collect somewhere near $8 in royalties per Android device, however, meaning its royalty fees could total $3.4 billion in 2013.
From now on I will be referring to M$ as Pot and Google as Kettle.
1) Nope not claiming that, I'm saying that both companies are using antiquated patent laws to extract revenue from their competitors in a manner that makes both of them appear to be Patent Troll megacorps.
2) The amount of money paid out is kinda moot (arbitrary sums at best), the ethics of such behavior is the question. They both play this game to their own advantage and therefore are basically the same. Sell 500 million Xboxes? Yeah, they would love to wouldn't they. Then M$ wouldn't have to buy up the rights to license Nokia's patents for the next 10 years to help ensure future prosperity.
The difference is that those "antiquated patent laws" allow Microsoft to charge whatever it can get away with in licence fees for *NON FRAND* patents that it holds (don't forget that it holds patents in standards like h.264 which have been committed as FRAND, and for which it gets very little money).
When a manufacturer gets involved in setting a patent they commit to following FRAND rules for any of their patents which are included in the standard. FRAND doesn't mean that they must charge near nothing, but they DO have to prove that the rate they offered is the same for everyone else (and if they wanted $4bn from MS for one device then they'd have been pulling in trillions from the rest of the market).
It's not about "no royalties", it's about them being fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory.
That falls down a bit because it's defined by money-grubbing lawyers, whose job it is to look at all the facts, then present the most extreme case they can in their clients' favour, but, you know. It's good in theory.
Microsoft indeed do not "extort" money in this way.
What Microsoft do is sell or license their patents to non-practising third parties, who then - completely independently and with no prompting from Microsoft whatsoever - sue Microsoft's competitors for patent infringement.
"This is a landmark win for all who want products that are affordable and work well together," Microsoft said"
Stuff there is 'Working together' only as a guest,
The guest golden rule for an invite is probably that the guest must shaft Android.
Thus Firefox, Opera and Chrome and now quite uninvited.
Microsoft said in a statement. "The jury's verdict is the latest in a growing list of decisions by regulators and courts telling Google to stop abusing patents."
Some here dispute if Microsoft abused its patents or not. I lean towards yes but am unable to back that up. Then again, as a monopoly, Microsoft was quite an abusive company. Listening to them whine about Google is amusing. Now that Chrome is popular, I wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to claim that Google used its search monopoly and violated antitrust laws in the process? We need a popcorn icon.
Umm...no, not even close.
Motorola took it to a German court which imposed an injunction which is essentially a stop and cease order while the case is going through.
Now an injunction is for when the accusser is likely to suffer a non-financial loss which wasn't the case. As a FRAND patent Microsoft had to licence it which Microsoft didn't dispute, it was the value that was being disputed. As such the court case was purely about a financial loss which falls outside the remit of an injunction and the injunction was quashed.
The case itself never went before a German jury.
The case itself never went before a German jury
Maybe not, but I would think that if Microsoft were looking for reparations for being wronged in Germany that they would be required to do so in the jurisdiction under which they were wronged. The fact that they are both American companies should not make what happened in another country relevant to the American legal system.
I have no problem with Microsoft receiving payment from Google/Motorola as indemnification, but I would think that the payment for costs incurred in Germany should be decided by a German court instead. As it stands, I simply find that aspect of the settlement to be bizarre, but I do not know the entire situation and am most certainly (and thankfully) not a lawyer.
Definitely missed something, as MS weren't forced to relocate a warehouse, they choose to relocate it to the Netherlands as a way of sidestepping the potential German injunction. So I don't see why they should of received any compensation for this specific action.
The USA is a republic of largely self-governing states with widely divergent cultures and parochial self-interests. In the US, local and state interests will almost always trump national interests. For the Seattle-area jurors, Motorola and Google could just as easily have been Korean, when compared with well-known and admired hometown companies like Microsoft.
The USA is a republic of largely nominally self-governing states with widely divergent potentially diverse cultures and parochial self-interests. In the US, local and state interests will almost always are likely to trump national interests.
Yes, I think this case falls within those boundaries. Frankly the diversity/divergence of the cultures is much more along the lines of Emo Philips Ed/religion skit than any real diversity. (Starts with a guy named Ed who looks like a horse and is about to jump off a bridge). At work so I can't confirm a Google search for a link.
You would think that but you would be wrong.
I once sat on a case where one particular person should clearly have been excluded from the jury pool, but it wasn't until his number was actually pulled and they were about to seat the jury that he was eventually excluded when one side used a freebie to remove him. If all their freebies had been exhausted he would have sat on the trial.
Frankly I suspect he would have rendered a fair decision. He was friends with lawyers on both teams, knew the police well, and had friend in the real estate business. The case had to do with terms of a contract for an apartment complex that was sold to a different management company. But given that he was a doctor at the local hospital and the trial was expected to take 3 to 4 weeks or longer before deliberations started, I thought he should have been dismissed at the end of the first round of questions.
None would be employees, but most would, in some way, be benefiting from having a cash fountain up on the hill.
And no doubt many would have a negative feeling towards Californians who are kicking around their local boys. Nobody likes that feeling as they move from top-dog software state to underdog software state.
The poms must have felt the same thing when they taught the colonies rugby and then got thrashed.
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