Damages like the $147M verdict against RIM could make smartphones unaffordable | Hacker News Reader

Damages like the $147M verdict against RIM could make smartphones unaffordable

fosspatents.com

Bare in mind that this guy is the famous oracle consultant.

He's also paid by Microsoft.

He's an analyst. Analysts are paid by anyone who wants them to research and write a report on something in the area the analyst analyzes.

Any comment on the actual article? The entire gist of it seems quite reasonable. And you know, forget the $1M claim, and even look at the $2000 number, or just think a bit and come up with your own numbers. The point still holds.

Florian Mueller has proved himself an unreliable source too many times. I'd prefer to wait until someone else picks this story up.

Rather silly when if you remove the word wireless from the patent and read it thru.

All phones have wires in them, thats how there low-level transport layer work. Is a wire perfectly dense or are there gaps at the sub atomic level which the electrons flow.

If you think of a old sailboat battleship as a device and semiphore as the wireless transport layer then you could equaly apply this to Nelsons times.

Also thought configuration of a phone was done via the GSM and even the CDMA standards in that the registeration process to the network and control SMS do that. WHat came first, hmmmm.

1) patent should never of been approved upon common sence of the time and mearly add's nothing. 2) charge per use is just plain old silly 3) chewbacca defence used at all on the jury?

makes you wonder: get all patents add word wireless as a adjective and patent as something new. Wait a bit, then profit. Crazy

Of course the patent was silly. Almost all of them are. The news hers is that the jury came up with $8US as the reasonable per-handset license fee. As the blog post points out, extrapolating that to the number of known, licensable patents used by a modern handset leads to a total IP license cost of about a million dollars for a device with a cost of production of about $150. It's a clear existence proof that the patent regime is unsustainable.

It's also clearly a mistake by the jury (or the judge maybe, depending on details about jury instructions about which I'm ignorant), and I'm sure it will be reduced on appeal.

Wasn't this same guy trumpeting $6bil damages in oracle-google case...

No, Google, not me, was trumpeting that figure. Google made a publicly-accessible court filing that claimed Oracle demanded up to $6.1 billion. In that particular legal context, Google would not have had to state the number at all (it could have merely referenced it), or it could have redacted it for the general public, but it wanted to put it out.

I wasn't even first to pick it up: Reuters reported on it before I did.

My reporting was nonjudgmental. I just informed everyone of what Google's filing said.

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