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Comment by Construct | Hacker News Reader

Even disabled in-app purchases still leaves you open to litigation. Lodsys is demanding their 0.575% of all transactions going forward as well as those that occurred in the past.

Obviously, 0.575% of in-app sales for a handful of high-profile apps isn't going to make Lodsys wealthy. What they really want is for Apple to buy their patent for millions of dollars to make this bad publicity go away.

Even more worrisome are the reports now that MacroSolve is extorting app developers in the same way for using forms in their applications.

In-app purchase and using forms in your application are absolutely trivial to someone skilled in the art. Unfortunately, the costs of proving this in a court are likely to be massive, especially now that Apple et. al. have essentially validated this patent by licensing it themselves. Very disappointing across the board.

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As I understand it, there are two big reasons they're proposing a boycott, and neither is actually to avoid paying this fee (which most of these guys consider pretty negligible).

Firstly, they're worried about a flood of me-too suits. Immediately stopping use of the feature is sort of a poison pill intended to dissuade patent trolls, who would actually prefer that the developers continue to use the feature and continue to pay up instead of just paying back fees.

Second, Apple is a very conservative company and it takes a lot of time to get them to actually respond to anything. This boycott is intended to make Apple notice faster than they otherwise would. A lot of the boycotters are also filing bugs against the API.

> especially now that Apple et. al. have essentially validated this patent by licensing it themselves. Very disappointing across the board.

I thought that Apple picked up this licenses as part of a bulk deal with the previous holder where they bought hundreds/thousands/millions of licenses all in one place as blanket cover. It's impractical to believe that they hand-vetted each one, so it hardly sounds like validation, even in court.

Apple, Google and MS licensed the same patent when it was with IV its now with asshole patent troll..asshole patent troll is claiming that license does not cover 3rd party developers who make use of an api from Apple, Google, or MS.

Brings into question the utility of bothering to do business with IV, doesn't it?

"Even more worrisome are the reports now that MacroSolve is extorting app developers in the same way for using forms in their applications."

The sharks smell the blood and home in on their helpless prey. I suspect many more patent trolls will raise their ugly heads in the weeks to come: grab what you can, while you can.

The prey, in the meantime, is calculating how long they can stay profitable against the rising army of patent trolls. Maybe paying 45% to patent trolls, 30% to Apple, still leaves them with 25% of AppStore revenue for their own. That might still a viable business model to keep developing for iOS, and might pay the rent.

Most apps who are able to make anything at all average somewhere around $4000-7000 in sales for the lifetime of their app. I can attest to that firsthand. Even at 70% it is not a viable business model for most (except for the <1% who are fortunate enough to make a lot of money in the app store). If every damned patent troll comes out of the woodwork claiming their share, then it will even be less worthwhile than it is now.

"Even disabled in-app purchases still leaves you open to litigation."

I can't believe no one has commented on this. How is this possibly true? Not using a patent can open one up to a litigation on a patent?? This statement makes no sense.

I believe the idea is that you profited from using the patented technology in the past, so you still owe Lodsys a cut of past sales.

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