MEGA PATENT DUMP! Ericsson, Smartflash blitz Apple: iPhone, iPad menaced by sales block Emboldened by its $533m patent-infringement win against Apple just a few days ago, Smartflash is suing the iPhone maker AGAIN – and Ericsson is joining the fray. Ericsson v Apple The Swedish telecoms giant has filed two complaints to the US International Trade Commission (ITC) – one accusing Apple handhelds of ripping off …
You better make everything yourself... the popcorn machine is probably covered as are the beer processes and the chair design. So, pop the corn in the fireplace, make the beer in your celler and harvest some timber to make wood for the chairs. Don't sell... just make a one of, keep it covered and hidden.
US patent 6,122,263: "Internet Access For Cellular Networks". Seemed a bit obvious, so I thought I'd read it.
TL;DR: The patent describes how (in the late 90s) wireless mobile or cell links tend to be slower than wired links and that these links are bridged together already for voice. PSTN and ISDN are circuit switched but IP is packet switched. The "invention" describes a particular method of sending data as well as voice over the two types of layer 2 links.
By that time layer 2 bridging and layer 3 routing were already invented and so was flow control. Should a particular implementation, linking existing standards, be considered innovative?
Should a particular implementation, linking existing standards, be considered innovative?
The USPTO seems to think so....
We don't know the detail of the size of the FRAND payment demanded and how it compares to other FRAND deals done with the same patents. If Ericcsson wants a direct Percentage of the iDevice retail price then I think that they will get a beating in the court. There are huge numbers of precidents that support Apple. However the think it is to note that BOTH Companies here has chosen East Texas for their case against the Fruity Co.
Given that East Texas is a renowned home for Patent Trolls because the local jury's seem to enjoy sticking it to the big companies, I think that Apple will probable lose in the first Trial.
Then it will go to appeal which will happen elsewhere. That's where Apple may win.
IMHO, they'd have got a lot more 'cred' if they had chosen say Delaware for the cases.
This was issued at a time the USPTO was dialed back on the theory that there was no point in having the USPTO do work that would only really be decided in court. This is exactly the outcome that was desired - the USPTO is a cash source and the patent attorneys get some business. Win-Win. At the time someone could probably have gotten a patent on the wheel.
The rounded corners thing was a 'Design Patent' - which is not what we would think of as a real ('Utility') Patent - it's more akin to Aston Martin protecting the shape of the grills on their cars, for example. Whilst a Design Patent has been granted to Apple for the specific corner radius and ratios, it may be too broad to enforce and it hasn't yet been tested in court.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/patdesc.htm
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rectangle-with-rounded-corners
Next!
"Should a particular implementation, linking existing standards, be considered innovative?"
Is this similar to Apple's taking of existing technology and packaging it into a new patent..? I mean, think of all of Apples's patents, phone, watch etc. I mean a rectangular phone with rounded corners (no phone was completely square, everything is rounded to some degree), existed before, but they did "patent" it..
They also take existing technology, put it in conjunction with something else and patent the lot.. What's different in this case?
This issue was covered extensively on Groklaw.
If the Patent owner licenses a company just to produce chips with their patented 'stuff' inside then the end user must pay the 'use' license.
So a company could license say Samsung to make stuff containing their patented gizmos but not to use it in their own products. Samsung could sell the chips to other bits of Samsung, Apple or anyone. However those buyers are liable to pay the patent owner company to use the gizmos into their devices.
If however the patent owner wants to 'doub'e dip' and charge the chip maker AND the end user to use their patents then personally, I hope that the patents in question get nullified. Having your cake and eating it sort of thing.
I don't want to comment on the merits of these particular patents, as I'm not interested enough in the case to read them. As to why patent licenses are not included in the price of the chips though, that's because most of the big companies in the telecommunications business have big R&D operations and loads of patents. They make direct deals with each other in which they cross-license their patent portfolios and the patent license fees more or less cancel out.
However, most of these companies don't make their own chips, even ones that they design themselves. Samsung is one of the few mobile manufacturers that is also a big chip manufacturer. In addition, patents from multiple companies are often incorporated into chip designs sold by third parties. The company which owns the patent usually has to buy chips from multiple sources. If the license fee was included in the price of the chip, then the companies who own the patents would be paying twice for the same patent - once in the cross license deal (as mentioned above), and once in the price of the chip. Sometimes you can buy the chips with a patent license included, but that of course costs more.
Apple is one of the few major vendors that don't have much in the way of unique technology patents that matter to anyone else. Their patents tend to be on things like "rounding the corners on a rectangle". In other words, they're pretty much like the bottom of the line Chinese vendors, except with more stylish cases. The larger Chinese vendors such as Huawei by the way are investing loads of money in hardware R&D with the intention of getting their patents incorporated into future standards.
FRAND doesn't mean "donating" patents to the public domain. It simply means that you will offer the same deal to everyone and it has to be "reasonable" in comparison to similar patents held by other companies. Note that I said "offer". The other party is free to negotiate a better deal than the standard one provided they have something to offer in return, such as a large patent portfolio (FRAND or not) of their own.
When it comes to these sorts of negotiations, Apple has a very weak hand. I imagine what the Ericsson case is about is they are hoping the court will set a lower price than Ericsson's standard FRAND offer. Foreign companies going up against an American company in an American court often end up with the short end of the stick. There's no risk to Apple, since if they lose they can simply go back and take the FRAND terms which Ericsson offered in the first place.
I can't comment much on Smartflash, since that's a completely different situation unrelated to Ericsson other than it happened to be filed at around the same time. Ericsson's patents seem to be mainly or entirely hardware patents, which tend to hold up fairly well in court cases. Smartflash seems to be software patents which the higher courts have been frowning on lately. It's just an extension of their previous lawsuit, I won't be surprised if this one gets tossed out on appeal.
"The larger Chinese vendors such as Huawei by the way are investing loads of money in hardware R&D with the intention of getting their patents incorporated into future standards."
Not just in mobile.
Their proposal for distributed layer3 routing over TRILL is both a doozy and a game-changer for datacentre or mesh-connected campus switching - it increases robustness whilst reducing equipment count - generally a good thing - and it's equally applicable across MANs as it is across campus networks.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-trill-irb-02
Byebye core routers and the SPOF that goes with 'em.
Seems that the law of return is hitting them with a very large clue stick.
If you launch patent wars or do like you accused others of doing, it's no wonder you run in trouble.
People just wait for you at the next corner and you shouldn't be surprised if you get mugged solid.
Maybe Apple will not be so fast suing companies for telephones with round corners once they have their phones banned This time , even Obama might not be able to save them.
This lawsuit is nice, but better yet, someone needs to go back to ~2001 and figure out how a company that had almost shit for spending wound up spending so little to create so many products so quickly. In other words, are these lawsuits missing something?
Either way, that fabulously unfounded number of 700 billion should be dropping.
Here you go.
http://www.tuaw.com/2014/05/20/what-ever-became-of-microsofts-150-million-investment-in-apple/
Blame Bill Gates. The $150M that was invested enabled Apple to survive. Then the first iMac made them lots of money and the rest is history.
Apple has also bought a lot of relatively small companies for their skills and technology. Sometimes those purchases don't really affect products for 3-4 years.
>This lawsuit is nice, but better yet, someone needs to go back to ~2001 and figure out how a company that had almost shit for spending wound up spending so little to create so many products so quickly
Basically, Apple read Wired.com's advice '101 Ways to Save Apple', and did the opposite on almost every point:
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple_pr.html
But seriously, Jobs returned to Apple in '97, the iMac was announced 18 months later. The iPod was released three years later in 2001, the iPhone 6 years after that... that's not a breakneck speed.
Remember that Apple's problem in the mid nineties was too large a product portfolio. They already had a talented design team - with experience of ARM-based hand-held devices - that wasn't being fully used by upper management.
"Seems that the law of return is hitting them with a very large clue stick."
Patent lawsuits were regarded as nuclear weapons back in the 1990s - powerful but extremely dangerous and likely to trigger all out patent warfare once one outfit started using them.
It was expected that any outfit launching them for non-egrarious violations would experience massive retaliation given that it's impossible to produce anything without multiple overlapping patents covering it.
That prediction is coming to pass.
As has been proven with the Exxon holding of patents on NiMH batteries there's no requirement to issue patent licenses _at_all_, let alone on a FRAND basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries
It's possible to argue that standards-essential patents should be subject to compulsary flat-fee licensing but that's not where things stand at the moment virtually anywhere in the world - and in this case the argument is that Apple is refusing to pay anything at all (not the first case like this they're facing - and in the previous ones they settled).
It's worth noting that Apple's own "patent lawsuits" have been about "trade dress" - What the US calls "design patents" is what everyone else generall calls "registered designs". This one is much more serious as it's about their unauthorised use of the technology underlaying the pretty case.
You could fix this overnight. Any patent used in a standard must be included in a patent pool. If you don't want to 'settle' for a share of the pool then don't fight to include your tech in standards. FRAND has proven itself nothing but a boon to lawyers paid for by us indirectly via increased costs passed on to us.
@Rampant spaniel - the patents in question ARE in a patent pool. The issue is that Apple is refusing to pay up _at all_ whilst it tries to wrangle discounts over FRAND pricing.
The factor that they bring almost no new technology to the table means they have little to negotiate with (packaging a bunch of other people's tech and patenting the case it's shoved in is not innovative at the silicon level)
This tactic isn't new for Apple and allowing it to go to court is clearly worthwhile for them or they wouldn't do it - it's happened a few times already. I'd be vastly amused if they got hit with swinging punitive damages.
Regardless of the merits of the complaints I am saddened, but not surprised (to paraphrase a QOTW about trolls), that a patent dispute between Ericsson and Apple has something to do with East Texas. Does either company even have a presence there? I can't help thinking that lawyers for manufacturing and non-manufacturing entities alike habitually collude to convince their employers/clients to slug it out in Texas, and even the manufacturers don't mind much since we, the consumers, pay the costs, anyway.
"Somebody should remind the Ericsson lawyers that Ericsson is in the business of selling cellular base station hardware"
Ericsson makes far more from patent royalties than from selling hardware - even more so as other makers have made heavy inroads into selling base stations, but they have to pay patent royalties to Ericsson which is now a minority player in that side of the industry (Many of those patents are due to run out soon).
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