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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

High fees are the "least" defensible? Apple just asked for and got a full-on import ban on the Galaxy Nexus...

None of this serves to justify the nonsense out there. But if you're willing to look the other way when one side plays hardball, don't be shocked when their opponent hits back. Patents are a huge mess, but this is hardly a one-sided issue about "Google", and to try to make it so is plain disingenuous.

(I suppose the counter argument is that Apple's patents were never termed FRAND, so that makes a technical difference. Might be so. But that's certainly not a "moral" difference, which seems to be the terrain you're standing on in your argument. Edit: and multiple folks posted just that. Let's just say I find that argument nonsense, "FRAND" is a technical distinction, not a moral one; try explaining it to your non-industry friends for an existence proof of that.)

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> But that's certainly not a "moral" difference, which seems to be the terrain you're standing on in your argument.

No, it's a moral difference. The whole point of the FRAND designation is to protect organizations from lawsuits.

It's not all fair game and equal. Suing someone over a regular patent is like shooting someone on your property after putting up an explicit "No Trespassing" sign. You might not agree with it or think it was fair but (in some places) the owner is protected.

Suing someone over a FRAND patent is like shooting someone that comes onto your property after you put up a giant "Visitors Welcome" sign. The terms were clear & public knowledge and you went back on them. Both can still be considered awful even though more people would agree the second one is unquestionably morally wrong.

That's an absolutely ridiculous analogy, given that Apple shot first. You're point only makes sense if you're talking about unrelated cases. It's hardball. I said this elsewhere, but if you insist on taking sides here you are part of the problem.

Complete nonsense. Samsung and Motorola are betraying the TIA/ITU process that they participated in in good faith by citing these patents in the dispute. They're setting fire to the whole system that they themselves helped to build.

Why would Qualcomm et. al. want anything to do with these clowns in the next round of 4G standardization negotiations? Bearing in mind that Qualcomm has invented more of the actually useful patents in 3GPP technologies than Samsung and Motorola put together, and that Samsung and Motorola are now claiming that Qualcomm's customers effectively don't have a license to those same 3GPP technologies?

Somehow everyone agreed just how gross and mendacious this was back when Rambus stabbed everyone in JEDEC in the back. Now that Samsung and Motorola are doing it, it's ... better?

Apple shot first? Give me a break.

Your response here is beyond ridiculous. I think you should try to separate your emotions from the discussion.

If Apple has a "no trespassing" sign one would expect them to shoot first. That doesn't give others who have a "visitors welcome" sign the right to shoot people on their property.

The moral difference is FRAND. If these weren't I'd say that morally they could block shipment or ask such fees (there is another moral argument to be made against the patent system, but the one about FRAND is even more fundamental).

Companies know that they may have to pay the piper on patents, but there's a belief that on FRAND patents they will be very reasonable rates. Google is basically saying that you can't trust us or our partners.

It seems to me that, at worst, Google is saying you can't trust us or our partners... if you sue us. That doesn't seem at all surprising or unexpected.

Apple just asked for and got a full-on import ban on the Galaxy Nexus

Samsung has requested injunction on Apple's products in the past too. IIRC they were all denied. Motorola requested, and was briefly granted, an injunction on Apple products in Germany also.

when one side plays hardball, don't be shocked when their opponent hits back

Absolutely. More power to them. That's how the game works. Nothing will change until the rules of the game change. This brings me to the whole 'X sued Y first' issue which is kind of silly too. We know when lawsuits were filed. We have no clue what happened privately or what legal considerations were made behind closed doors. The second Nokia sued Apple the race was on industry wide to start legally testing patents. The best way to do that is to sue someone. A good offense is a good defense right? Everyone is going to end up suing and eventually licensing to everyone. That's about the only way this can play out. At some point down the road, if it hasn't already happened, you're going to have Android OEMs suing other Android OEMs too. It's kind of pointless to paint anyone as good guys or bad guys. There is no option here to be a conscientious objector. Google seems to have tried that for a while until they wised up.

Apple asked for, and the Judge agreed that Apple may indeed be irreparably harmed if an injunction on the import of the Galaxy Nexus wasn't made.

This is part of how the legal system plays out. There is nothing wrong with it, morally or otherwise.

What is wrong is to have your patents be a part of an now industry standard and no longer license the patents under FRAND when you have made a promise to do so. In the future how is a standards body supposed to accept your IP to be used as part of a standard when clearly you will renege on an agreement you made by contributing your IP to that standard.

I sure as hell wouldn't want to use any of Samsung's IP in the next gen wireless standard for fear of Samsung reneging on its agreement to license said IP under FRAND terms.

How does "standards essential" sound? The point is that there is an industry standard, and the "FRAND" patents are (probably) necessary to implement the standard. There's a substantial difference between that type of patent and one for proprietary, single-vendor tech.

The moral difference is that they're not keeping their promise to the standard bodies which would've tried to work around the patents otherwise.

Lets say a company abuses a FRAND patent related to Wifi or GPS (that it previously deemed FRAND due to which their technology was included) and demands 20% of the price, that is much worse than Slide2Unlock, since Slide2Unlock can be worked around much easier than making a new Wifi or GPS standard and shipping hundreds of millions of devices, routers, GPS chips and launching satellites again.

Don't get me wrong, I hate the stupid Slide to Unlock patent as much as you, but there is certainly a moral difference between abusing a regular patent and a FRAND patent.

With Nokia getting into losses, this is a worrying trend since they own so many FRAND patents. If all these cases set a bad precedent on FRAND patents, we'll be doubly screwed.

I don't see it that way at all, sorry. Both have the effect of eliminating valid competition from the market. Both are bad. Condemning one and not the other makes you, personally, part of the problem and not the solution, because you're fighting only on one side. Your utopia, apparently, has Apple squeezing everyone else from the market. You'll forgive me if I question the moral basis for your argument.

One way might be ethically bad, but the other puts the squeeze on everyone. What Google is involved in here is unquestionalby worse than what Apple is doing (attacking one company for a perceived copy job).

I think the issue is that you're an Apple hater/Android Fanboy and you're letting this clod your logic.

Getting kicked in the shin by a stranger is bad, as is getting shot point blank in the belly by a sawed off shotgun. Two things being bad doesn't mean one isn't worse.

No. Just no. Google (really Samsung, but whatever -- let's leave Google as the proxy here for simplicity) isn't squeezing "everyone." They're squeezing exactly one party, who happens to have already sued them. This is a defensive move in a larger battle, and viewing it as one-sided while cheering for an at-best-equally-at-fault party is just perpetuating the absurd status quo. Either you think patents suits are bad, or you are part of the problem.

Nonsense. If Samsung gets away with this it will have implicates for all agreements of this kind. Your hate for Apple is completely clogging your logic here.

What implications will it have, exactly? Let's just say what you seem to be implying: that FRAND agreements are worthless once you sue someone. Is that so bad? The patent covenants in the open source world almost always include this kind of term already.

So explain to me why the world will fall apart if everyone gets to ignore FRAND terms when used against parties that are already suing them over patent licenses? That sounds like a good thing to me.

As I recall, Nokia started the war by demanding either an exorbitant price for their FRAND patents from Apple or the right to cross-license Apple's UI patents.

I don't see Apple in any way morally superior here. It is as if a country came to a summit and said "I see you have a nice arms control treaty. I want to join - except I won't be including this weapon, with which I'm going to immediately attack you".

Because FRAND was a way to avoid mutually assured destruction. With Apple finding away to start an attack separately, one can hardly say "hey, they were taking the high ground here".

That's not correct.

FRAND was a way to ensure that a standard had the ability to become popular without patents getting in the way. Cross licensing is about avoid mutually assured destruction.

The idea that Apple got an injunction for a patent dispute is hardly unique. It happens all the time.

It certainly doesn't happen "all the time". You have other examples of the import of mainstream tech gadgets being enjoined outside the current patent mess? Has it ever happened to a PC?

Think about it some more. Suppose one smartphone company invests its money in R&D related to wireless communications that's fundamental to any smartphone, and as a result gets FRAND patents on those technologies. Now suppose their competitor instead invests its money in patenting things like swipe-to-unlock, creating a thicket of non-FRAND patents that allow them to attack any competing phone. The company that did the fundamental R&D that made smartphones possible loses to the company that patented a bunch of trivial things, because they have to license their patents to their competitors on the cheap, but their competitor doesn't have to license their thicket of non-FRAND patents and can sue to stop them actually selling any phones.

The way Apple is approaching FRAND patents disincentivises the kind of R&D required to make things like the iPhone possible in the first place. It didn't matter before because all the major phone manufacturers were doing some share of the R&D work, and this gave them a leg up on making their products work well - but that doesn't help if they can't actually sell those products because of Apple.

You really feel OK supposing that all Apple did for smartphones was swipe to unlock? Really? Like there was no difference in smartphones before iPhone and after? You are implying that all of Apples R&D was to patent swipe-to-unlock, and presto, iPhone is ready, because everything else was done by other companies? One may hate Apple if he wants but this kind of twisting is just stupid.

All of the claims Apple is getting injunctions and import bans based on are nonsense like slide-to-unlock.

You know the patent that is bedeviling HTC? It goes back to the Power Macintosh help system (and was anticipated by Netscape Navigator 2.0b1, among other things, most likely). You may be able to convince yourself that that was important R&D that went into the iPhone. I'd say Apple went rummaging through the files to find garbage to throw against the legal system, hoping some might stick. So far, it looks like their bet has paid off.

They only promised to make the patents FRAND. The fact that it turns out there was no actual solid legal definition of FRAND is why they are in court. That was a disaster in the making anyway and left intentionaly vague so these same large companies could bully smaller ones.

the difference is hypocrisy.

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