Google sues to protect Android device makers from Apple-backed patent hell
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
(The answer is that it keeps you from being painted as a mark by other trolls. But it still doesn't change the math -- it costs more to fight than to pay.)
Not necessarily. Companies could be paying them licensing fees because it's less costly then a protracted court battle with an unknown outcome.
> ... gives Congress the power "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
From what I read based on what some legal experts simplified but again, "it's the Internet" but basically, they considered patents as legal rights to monopolize on such innovations.
So, based on that, exactly how is it anti-competitive to disallow other companies to use the said patents unless they agree to pay for the rights?
The argument here is that the only ones that should benefit from this are the authors and inventors, and they and only they are granted "exclusive" rights. No one else. In fact, I'd find that fair. The implication being you can't sell or transfer those rights to someone, and those rights are only granted to the authors and inventors.
Which leads us to this question:
"exactly how is it anti-competitive to disallow other companies to use the said patents unless they agree to pay for the rights?"
It's not, as long as the one doing the license is the author or inventor. One should not be able to transfer those rights to a third party, as it's explicitly an exclusive right.
It's fair to ask if it's bad for there to be an official form of anti-competition, but call a spade a spade.
EDIT: The replies of this comment say that the others (Apple etc) are too copying and copying kernel in not wrong. Well, I did not say that copying is wrong. What I mean is that copying is NOT innovation.
Also, Android didn't copy the kernel. They adopted it, modified it, and abide by the license (and have even started contributing changes upstream).
BTW, widgets were original to android in regards to apple, were they not?
'Copy': make a similar or identical version of; reproduce: [1] Google forked and contribute to the kernel. They did not create their own identical version of, or reproduce, the kernel.
[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/copy
Although it seems so now, keep in mind Google bid for these patents themselves and lost. They were also offered to join the Rockstar consortium, which they declined. Unfair definitely, but not enough to qualify as anti-competitive under a black & white banner.
Just saying.
[1] Weaker in relation to the combined power of the conglomeration, anyway.
Huh, haven't they been using them against Apple and MS? MS now pays them for H.264 patents, though considerably less than what demanded, and Motorola got convicted and fined by a jury for FRAND abuse.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/05/judge-slaps-motoro...
Having said that, one of the parties involved in collusion was Microsoft. They covered their tracks well, as they have had more than a few run ins with the government here. You can see that in the, "Look, we asked them to join us, they chose not to do so" line.. Which was a laughable point by the way, as joining their group wouldn't have allowed for protecting android manufacturers. But it provides an alibi for regulators. IMO, it's not a very good alibi.
Microsoft and Apple took a huge risk in their collusion. I imagine discovery might bring up some juicy tidbits. I figure they knew the risks, but reasoned that sticking it to their biggest 'problem' was worth the risk of getting caught up with regulators. So that tells you about how scared they are.
Technically you may be correct but I really think the 'troll' moniker is apt in this case.
And use them "for themselves"? Rockstar is a little more than a shell company.
Also, didn't a Google employee basically debunk that "Google had to start from scratch after iPhone was revealed" claim?
Also, link to the original article; http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-da...
If Android was, as you seem to think, not a copy of the original iPhone OS, why did it take a further 18 months to release anything after the initial iPhone unveiling?
> Copy and paste was a nothing feature
> ... although its blatantly been influenced by the direction Apple took, it took Google until Jellybean 4.2 to catch up with the quality of implementation of iOS
I don't mean to come off like an ass (but don't really give a shit if I do), but you're just positing your own opinions in the place of the previous poster's opinions, then acting like you've proved some great point. How exactly are you advancing this discussion? Your post is just as useless as the one you're replying to.
I'm as big of an Apple fanboy as there is, but you're making us look bad. Multitasking and copy and paste may just be "trite memes" to gods like you, but mere mortals like me use both of those on a daily basis.
This is equally applicable to your post:
> ... instead of trotting out tired and trite memes because someone has had the temerity to call out your favourite team, don't.
EDIT: And your question,
> If Android was, as you seem to think, not a copy of the original iPhone OS, why did it take a further 18 months to release anything after the initial iPhone unveiling?
is blatantly phrased as a leading question. You're really trying to make it seem as though the only reason to not release anything for 18 months after the iphone announcement was to copy the iphone. Give the the iphone the credit it is due; it revolutionized mobile phones.
How are you so certain that the question in google wasn't "Why rush to compete with a product that just revolutionized the industry when yours clearly pales in comparison?"
Fair enough, Apple continued to work on it, and by all accounts (I don't have one) has managed to make it a fine product. But let's not pretend that it was obvious to everyone that "Apple revolutionised mobile phones" from day one.
It absolutely supported text messaging—at least in the US. Are you from a country where it didn't?
As to my 'leading' question; in context it's totally relevant. I'd like to know. I totally believe your version, although the evidence suggest otherwise. As I noted, Android didn't feel nearly as finished as iOS until 4.2.
By the same logic, the iPhone was just a "copy" of the Windows ME phones (iPaq etc). But with finger instead of a stylus.
Apple's revolution was in their magnificent marketing; and to a secondary degree the way they simplified the complex "enterprise" phones so that anyone could use them, then exploited that to build the App Store. In the short term they were less functional, but in the long term they "offered" exponentially more features (via 3rd parties in the marketplace).
http://m.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=2f9ac708-83af-4...
The article ends with a solid statement as: “It may be that they (Google) should have bid more (at the auction for Nortel’s patents) based on the realization that these patents were vital to their search business,” says Rappaport from IP Checkups
I agree with the Nortel Retirees that Google knew this was coming, they just decided it would cost less to defend than the $X billion dollars they would have had to bid to get the patents.
Then tell us why they don't file the suits in their own names.
It's clearly because they're doing something distasteful and don't want to get the stink on themselves, and because they don't want to be parties in a court case where the judge has the ability to rule against them once and for all or impose penalties.
But they did file a bunch of other suits "in their own names". Both Apple and Microsoft are involved in litigation with other Android manufacturers in multiple jurisdictions, so it's not like they're unwilling to get their hands dirty.
That's the how, not the why. They had a choice to do it this way.
And "operate autonomously" doesn't mean much when you first fill the subsidiary with nothing but litigators and patents that have already been licensed to everyone meaningful other than the parent's competitors. It's like setting loose a rabid animal near your competitor's business and then trying to disclaim responsibility because the animal was "operating autonomously." What did they expect to happen?
> But they did file a bunch of other suits "in their own names". Both Apple and Microsoft are involved in litigation with other Android manufacturers in multiple jurisdictions, so it's not like they're unwilling to get their hands dirty.
Lawsuits against Google's customers instead of Google. And that's part of the reason why Rockstar is dirty pool.
Suppose Apple files a suit against an Android manufacturer, then a year into the litigation they show up and say "oh hi, we just bought some new patents, so let's throw out all the work we did getting to this point in the trial and start over." That clearly stinks of harassment, is going to make the judge unhappy, and may justly restrict what the plaintiffs are allowed to do with the new claims.
By filing the litigation through Rockstar, they get a separate trial with two bites at the apple in front of two juries, the litigation costs more for the target because they have to defend two overlapping cases in different courts instead of having them consolidated, and they can do it again and again with different troll subsidiaries until their smaller competitors are destroyed.
I don't think it was that simple, considering that the Nortel portfolio covers a wide array of different technology areas and industries. What other feasible choice did they have? Transfer the patents to themselves? Six companies were involved, each infringing different subsets of the portfolio: who gets what patents? Even if they did divvy up the portfolio somehow, they certainly weren't going to keep them lying around, not after paying so much for them -- They had to be licensed. Splitting the portfolio would not only make it weaker, but it would mean multiple individual licensing efforts. Rockstar currently fulfills the same function that MPEG-LA does.
> And "operate autonomously" doesn't mean much when you first fill the subsidiary with nothing but litigators and patents that have already been licensed to everyone meaningful other than the parent's competitors.
If you read the document linked in the comment I cited, no, those patents were not licensed to anybody meaningful until the auction. But licensing efforts were on the way years when they were still owned by Nortel and before Rockstar was created, so pretty much everybody knew what was coming. That is why all these companies, including Google, were bidding for these patents in the billions.
> It's like setting loose a rabid animal near your competitor's business and then trying to disclaim responsibility because the animal was "operating autonomously." What did they expect to happen?
Well, they paid billions for these patents. Is it fair to them that other infringers get away scott free?
> Lawsuits against Google's customers instead of Google.
Google makes pretty much no money directly from Android. This inherently makes it difficult to extract damages from them. Not to mention that since Google bought Motorola, they do have lawsuits directly against Google as well.
> Suppose Apple files a suit against an Android manufacturer, then a year into the litigation they show up and say "oh hi, we just bought some new patents, so let's throw out all the work we did getting to this point in the trial and start over." That clearly stinks of harassment...
That's not how patent lawsuits work. Dozens or hundreds of patents are involved in a portfolio, but it's not feasible to sue over more than a handful of them, because court resources are extremely limited. If you see how past patent lawsuits have progressed, companies assert a small bunch of patents and over time winnow them down to an even smaller number that are mostly likely to prevail. It's actually rare to see new patents being asserted partway through a lawsuit because, as you said, it annoys judges -- typically a whole new lawsuit is filed instead, which is a whole lot of extra work.
This is intrinsically unfair to the patent-owners with large portfolios, because no matter how many patents are being infringed, they only get to assert a few, and even if they prevail, damages are limited to the patents asserted. This is why companies try to get injunctions -- that is the only way to get enough leverage to properly license an entire portfolio.
Multiple lawsuits seem like harassment only if you disregard the flip side of the coin, which is widespread infringement.
> By filing the litigation through Rockstar, they get a separate trial with two bites at the apple in front of two juries, the litigation costs more for the target because they have to defend two overlapping cases in different courts instead of having them consolidated, and they can do it again and again with different troll subsidiaries until their smaller competitors are destroyed.
If different patents and/or different products are involved, the cases are not overlapping, so it's not the same apple that they're getting bites at.
They could have. But the most significant choice they had and chose against was to use the patents defensively rather than offensively.
> Even if they did divvy up the portfolio somehow, they certainly weren't going to keep them lying around, not after paying so much for them -- They had to be licensed.
The state of North Korea fails. China spends really quite a lot of money to secure all of their nuclear and chemical weapons. Do they then "have to" sell them to terrorists who promise only not to use them against China?
> Splitting the portfolio would not only make it weaker, but it would mean multiple individual licensing efforts.
Even if the courts don't allow them to assert every patent anyway? What good is it to have thousands of overlapping patents if you can only assert a small number in practice?
> If you read the document linked in the comment I cited, no, those patents were not licensed to anybody meaningful until the auction.
I'm not talking about before the auction.
When a set of patents goes up for sale, the incumbents in the industry have three primary options to buy patents to avoid them getting into the hands of a troll that will try to shake them all down:
1) All band together and buy the patents. This is asking for antitrust trouble, both because all the incumbents are colluding in a way that prevents upstart competitors from procuring defensive patents that would be usable against the incumbents, and because they're conspicuously forming an effective cartel to buy patents instead of bidding against one another. And on the other side of the coin, it's paying the Danegeld collectively, and the sum total paid to the troll by the collective has to be more than what any individual entity would otherwise pay else the seller could sell to that entity for use against its competitors. Which encourages more trolls to "offer" to sell you more patents and gives them more money to procure them with. This is really the patent "communism" option, and is likely to fail for the same reason: You're taking money from productive businesses to give to patent trolls, encouraging the proliferation of more patent trolls which suck more of the life out of productive businesses. That isn't sustainable. It also defeats any benefit of the patent system to actual practicing entities, because they need all their competitors to coordinate to buy the patents of failed businesses, which means you can't use your own patents against them or they'll not cooperate with you and instead buy the patents themselves for defensive purposes (or do (3) to your detriment in retaliation).
2) They can individually take turns placing a bid on patents only when the current high bid is a trolling entity, and then use them only defensively. This is the patent "cold war" option. Each incumbent has to place a bid periodically to maintain their respective arsenals as older patents expire and to make the arrangement stable, but they don't get into bidding wars with one another so nobody ever has to pay excessive amounts. If improvidently granted patents do fall into the hands of a troll who demands excessive royalties then everyone has the duty to fight the good fight to invalidate those patents to make sure that sort of parasitic enterprise is unprofitable. This also makes the patent system not useful for software because any patent assertion against an incumbent invokes mutually assured destruction, but it's probably the most effective way to mitigate the damage of large collections of patents falling into the hands of aggressive trolls.
3) They can buy the patents, immunize themselves, then let them loose to a troll to be used against competitors. Thermonuclear war. Every time patents come up for auction you now get a bidding war because nobody wants to have to fight a lawsuit against a troll funded with competitors' money, which means everybody will soon be overpaying for bad patents while continually fighting suits from patent trolls set up by competitors. Meanwhile building a defensive portfolio becomes next to useless because competitors attack collaterally through trolling entities that can't be asserted against, so instead of nominally wasteful cross-licensing you get monstrously expensive prolific patent litigation. This is the one they chose.
> Well, they paid billions for these patents. Is it fair to them that other infringers get away scott free?
Sure, you just let the competitors pick up the tab for the next round the next time a company full of patents goes bust.
> Google makes pretty much no money directly from Android. This inherently makes it difficult to extract damages from them.
So try to get an injunction. If you theoretically had a solid, valuable patent that Android infringed then Google would subsequently have the incentive to license or avoid it to prevent the injunction, and this would eliminate the duplicative litigation against every individual Android OEM, creating efficiencies for everyone.
It just proves their intent. It isn't to stop these "infringers" from doing something wrong in particular, it's to harass in general the competitors who do well in the market. Creating waste and mutual costs is a benefit to the larger entity that can better absorb the cost, and they know it.
> If different patents and/or different products are involved, the cases are not overlapping, so it's not the same apple that they're getting bites at.
It kind of is, because the thing they're getting more chances at is getting a judge or jury who will significantly over-value at least one of their large arsenal of patents. It's a game the defendants have to win every time but the plaintiffs only have to win once -- one billion dollar award will pay for years and years of unjustifiable patent trolling with low quality patents.
[note: responding in two comments because it said "that comment is too long"]
I agree with that. That is one of the symptoms of the disease. It is preposterous for every competitor to be infringing thousands of patents held by every other competitor. That is a pathological outcome that doesn't commonly occur in non-software industries. But we have to address the disease, not the symptom. How do we get to a world where the large majority of patent infringement in the software industry is a result of intentional infringement rather than independent invention or a need for compatibility with existing software? The easy solution is for software to be unpatentable. If you don't like that, what's your alternative? (And if the solution involves improving software patent quality, please explain how and also what to do about all the low quality patents already issued.)
> and even if they prevail, damages are limited to the patents asserted.
The other side of this coin is that juries are extremely arbitrary when evaluating the value of a patent, and in the case of software patents will often vastly overestimate their value. There are easily thousands of features the lack of which would materially reduce market demand for a device, and each of those features may be covered by multiple (perhaps hundreds or more) patents. The value of the individual patent is therefore necessarily quite small (and it has no value without being part of a device requiring a large conglomeration of such features) -- it can't possibly be right that the value of one of five hundred patents covering a specific feature is the full hold-up value of including that feature, because that would make the accumulated cost of all the patent licenses vastly in excess of what customers pay or are willing to pay for the device as a whole.
As I think about it, this feels close to the heart of the problem with software patents: The patents each cover a small, independent but complementary incremental improvement that all come together to build common software. The value of the average such patent, i.e. what a practitioner of the invention can reasonably afford and be willing to pay if they were all licensed ex ante, is so much lower than what a defendant has to risk a jury awarding, or the hold-up value of an injunction on a shipped product, that it creates a profitable patent trolling market for entities willing to be loathed in exchange for the significant difference between the market value of a patent when licensed or purchased ex ante and the hold-up value of the same patent to vendors who are unknowingly infringing.
The trouble is the reasonable value of the average software patent is less than the transaction cost of negotiating a license for it. So they either get [cross-]licensed in bulk or (generally obliviously) infringed. But bulk licensing patents is a huge fail because it makes the quality of the individual patents irrelevant, which creates demand for large quantities of low quality patents -- which makes the problem even worse, because the more patents have to be evaluated the less resources you can afford to dedicate to evaluating each one. Meanwhile it devalues and deincentivizes high quality patents that require significant R&D to receive because they go on the same stack with the junk patents.
But how can you fix it? The fundamental problem is that the transaction costs of licensing a typical software patent eat most or all of the value of the patent. Trolling with bad patents is profitable because it foists transaction costs and uncertainty onto the defendant in excess of the value of the patent, so that paying more than the patent is worth but less than it costs to prove that in court becomes cost effective. Recalibrating damage awards and making it more difficult for plaintiffs to unreasonably foist litigation costs onto defendants may reduce the trolling problem, but if effective it would eat a lot of the value of most software patents, often the entire value, because the consequence of the value of the patent not exceeding (or only barely exceeding) the cost of negotiating a license would be born by the patent holders rather than the prospective licensees.
Which seems like a necessary outcome in any event. If the perverse incentives created by bulk licensing are to be avoided then the absolute number of software patents in play has to go down significantly, so that those remaining are the few high quality patents that justify licensing individually. I don't see any obvious way around that.
[note: responding in two comments because it said "that comment is too long"]
http://gizmodo.com/5949909/apple-and-google-spent-more-money...
Just sayin.
Its a semantic question. But my (soft) definition is a company that buys or registers patents, waits for them to be violated, then extracts licensing fees via legal threats or lawsuits. The non practicing pure trolls are just specialists.
By this logic, any standard bodies would be trolls as well if they decide to sue any companies that infringe without paying the fees.
1. http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=d258542c-dbfc...
They didn't give an order, but they created a company whose sole purpose is to file these types of lawsuits. Did they really think that it would never happen?
It would be like the Manhattan Project scientists washing their hands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima because Truman was the one that gave the order.
What exactly do you expect Rockstar to do when several Android OEMs are infringing on their patents without paying for it?
This is not correct. You're thinking of the Novell patents. Google did make a bid on the Nortel patents, but was not offered a place within Rockstar.
> What exactly do you expect Rockstar to do when several Android OEMs are infringing on their patents without paying for it?
This has zero relevance to a claim of them being a patent troll, as a troll can ask the exact same question (and usually does).
This is not correct. See http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-had-opport...
I think the confusion arose when Google complained about multiple firms ganging up to win the Nortel auction, and Microsoft shot back that they'd have invited Google into the gang too if it hadn't snubbed them during the Novell auction. All PR posturing on both sides, of course, but prone to sow confusion.
From your own source, here's what Microsoft said:
> Google says we bought -- Novell -- patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.
Also here's why Google didn't buy them:
http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/04/google-we-didnt-co-bid-on-...
> “A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it.”
Joining Microsoft to buy those patents would've made those patents useless for Google in the fight against Microsoft. Google is trying to buy up patents to defend against Microsoft. They can't do that if they can't assert those patents against Microsoft.
If I may try an analogy, say someone is coming at you with a knife, and you have nothing to defend yourself than a toy gun, and that person knows it's a toy gun. How useful is that gun threatening going to be to scare the guy with the knife away. Pretty useless no? Well that's the same thing with the Novell patents.
Of course they didn't want to. Why would they want to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a bunch of patents they couldn't actually use against any of their main competitors? All it would have bought them is a hole in their pockets (because who would have bought the patents from them if the entire industry had already been immunized to them?), and Apple and Microsoft would then have just bought a different set of patents to sell to trolls expecting for them to be used against Google.
Buying overly broad patents is paying the Danegeld. Once they know you pay the Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane.
That was about Novell patents - different company, and it all happened about a year earlier before Nortel thing went down. Completely different situations. Stop confusing them. I see this misinformation spread everywhere when there's a story about Rockstar.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/04/google-we-didnt-co-bid-on-...
That begs the question. Apple and Microsoft should not have created this evil zombie company in the first place.
Is that not the point of patents?
Suppress copycats and or extract monies for their copying/profiting from your novel works?
But what makes you say these patents don't cover aspects of Apple's and Microsoft's and the other shareholders' products? The patents involved in the Rockstar lawsuits cover networking, touch-screens and search. The shareholders make products which obviously infringed on these patents to varying extents, and that is why they paid billions for them.
Considering they've paid all that money to secure a "freedom to operate", so to speak, is it fair to them that everyone else gets to infringe with impunity?
We'd love to connect with some friendly people out west to help us, but not sure how to make that happen? It's not like we haven't tried - we spent a good deal of our savings to demo out in the Valley this past year.
Since we work full time jobs and are in our late 30s it seems harder then ever to find partners/those who can help. Though we will continue to work hard and further innovate with the goal/hopes in mind of finding help and or after a long road/fight be rewarded for our work.
Are there flaws with the connector?
Mag-Safe is a nice idea, but poorly executed. Everyone knows that cables have a significant failure point at the place where wires are soldered to pins, so it's disappointing when a company with excellence in design and attention to detail makes a connector that fails so often at that same place.
You could describe anything non standard and proprietary in that way.
Lightning is probably standardized by some reasonable definition of "standardized." It's proprietary, it's not an open standard, but it's a standard.
All this is splitting hairs. The criticism against lightning doesn't depend on the distinction non-standard v. not-an-open-standard.
It's the de-facto standard for all recent iOS devices and upcoming devices for the next 5 years, and a lot of people love the reversible connector. The only ones not liking it are the ones that invested a lot in the 30-pin iOS accessories.
Just as the 30-pin connector has been the de-facto standard the first several years for iOS devices and it wasn't a standard either.
About the cable; you mean its no standard? I agree with that the EU will force them now so thats fine.
Me too, which ones do you have?
Without the identifying the models, this discussion has no basis really. There are way too many android and win manufacturers there to decide which manufacturer, store or bad decision making ripped you off.
An Haswell(i7) Air, costs about $1550, the only notebooks that compare are the ultrabooks, the exact spec at acer (s7 series) costs about $1500-1600, the other manufacturers cost $1600-1800. Not quite "twice as expensive".
They may be ripoffs of the mac air design(aesthetic), not bad ripoffs tho.
It's excellent design, necessary, and improves on everything else presently extant. The use of any other connector would be worse than using the lightning connector.
You can be mad at change for the status quo's sake, but you may wish to reexamine your irrational anger surrounding this specific change, which is a clear improvement in all measurable dimensions.
Seriously?
I don't agree with what Jobs said, and he's obviously saying that out of personal hurt. But saying that this article isn't sensationalism, especially when the headline says it's Apple backed and not mention anything about a group of companies banding together ... you and I have very different interpretation on sensationalism.
And this is a blog, for fuck's sake. They can use whatever tone they want. The people wasting time complaining about "sensationalism" should go back to Reddit, where you get more fake Internet points for it.
Job's comments may well be, but that isn't the article's author's problem.
Given the amount they paid and given the on-going issues at least some of them have with both Google and the Android platform, many reports have talked about the consortium going on the attack or have assumed that it is the shareholders that have driven things. This is categorically not the case, Veschi says. “It was entirely my call based on the facts in front of me,” he states. “The shareholders got an email telling them what had happened after the suits were issued.”
You might not believe him, but it's not necessarily that unbelievable. For instance, Intellectual Ventures is, in a way, "Google-backed", since Google invested in one of their "funds" (or whatever they call it). Yet IV turned around and sued Motorola two years after Google acquired it.
1. http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=d258542c-dbfc...
It's clear that both Microsoft and Apple are pulling the strings. They didn't collectively spend $4.5 billion to just have Rockstar do whatever they want. (Not that creating a patent troll under any scenario is morally defensible for Microsoft or Apple).
The shell games provide them plausible deniability only to naive.
They sued Android. Android is a big threat to both Microsoft and Apple.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
They sued Android. Android is a big threat to both Microsoft and Apple.
Rockstar sued some Android phone makers because it infringes their patents and they don't have a license. Note that they didn't sue Sony, who makes Android phones, because Sony, being part of the consortium, has paid for those patents.
They didn't sue "Android." "Android" is an operating system; a collection of software. One cannot "sue iOS" or "sue Windows" either.
Commitments to the DoJ
The sale of the Nortel patents closed on 29th July 2011, which also happens to be Veschi’s birthday. But it took another few months – until Spring 2012 – for the acquisition to receive clearance from the US Department of Justice (DoJ). Although this approval may have taken some time to obtain, the only commitment that Rockstar itself gave to the DoJ (and the Federal Trade Commission) was that it would operate autonomously. This, explains Veschi, was so that the shareholders “as operating companies cannot pick and choose who we will target”
According to the project page,
"Our goal is to launch and maintain a completely free, data-rich, up-to-date, member-supported database that small companies can use to help defend against patent trolls."
They are starting with a patent owned by Treehouse Avatar Technologies regarding gaming avatars. Treehouse has been targeting indie game developers using US 8180858[2].
Eventually, they plan to build a prior art database targeting the most abused patents and provide small start-ups with free access.
[1] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/operation-ninja-s-t-a-r-he...
At least they didn't oversell it.
How many robots could we have exploring the solar system if companies weren't throwing money into stupid patents?
Like the Banana Equivalent Dose to explain regular radiation we need some easy to grasp comparison to explain just how much money is being wasted in this stupid system.
A) only companies using patents directly can sue
B) the maximum damages that can be awarded are 2x revenue related to the patents
This means that companies actually using patents and making a business out of them can benefit and stops patent trolls.
Am I crazy?
How do you determine the "revenue related to the patents"?
(My impression is that UW is fairly extreme in this regard)
Here's an article from Stanford law school: 'Are universities the new patent trolls?' http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776
Universities often (and unfairly IMHO) claim rights on graduate research precisely to monetize and act as patent gatekeepers.
Merry Christmas.
Action is required.
At the moment Google/Android are being attacked by Rockstar Bidco, the Patent Troll King. It owns >6000 (ex-Nortel) patents, which (Microsoft, Apple, Sony, RIM and Ericsson bought jointly) they all stuffed into the Rockstar Bidco company that has no other function than suing possible 'infringers'. Given the vagueness and fondness of the USPTO to 'create intellectual property', this could be the perfect patent storm and Rockstar's boss said it himself: 'Pretty much anybody out there is infringing'. Meaning that whatever gets into the crosshairs of Rockstar, is on the hook for possibly millions of dollars. Who can defeat a titanic patent Frankenstein as big as Rockstar Bidco? It cannot be sued because it produces nothing (aka an Non Practicing Entity). But it has enormous wealthy backers, so it can sue everyone for everything and just sit it out. In fact, its owners all hold patents on the mobile industry, so the 'urgency' and 'usefulness' of Rockstar could be questioned, outside of being a 'bigger stick to hit Android with'. Google or the Android manufacturers have no option but to face the lawsuits.
Google will have a hard time fighting them off, but I don't see the Android manufacturers survive in one piece. And that's exactly the idea: eradicate Android, make all software development that isn't owned (or graced) by the Rockstar owners a sticky patent mess, leading to a small set of 'friends of Rockstar' who can afford to develop software in peace. That's not only bad for Android or Google, that's a bad sign for software development in general.
Because what if Rockstar Bidco all of the sudden 'feels' that the SteamBox could threaten the Xbox/Playstation duopoly? What if Rockstar Bidco thinks that Ubuntu Phone OS is something that is in infringing on their phone software patents? Who will stand up for them? Of course Rockstar Bidco claims that they are independent, but that was only believed by fools when they formed and only idiots believe it now after the other shoe has dropped (Apple, RIM and Microsoft all attacking Google/Android).
And to the supporters of Rockstar, just to be clear: Google was only invited for a jointly bid on the Novell patents, never on the Nortel patents. As per the legal counsel of Google:
Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them.
In short: Microsoft told them it was going to shoot their dog but offered them to hold the gun when they did it.
The fact that so many frivolous software patents exist is bad enough, the fact that 5 of the biggest tech companies conspired to create the ultimate patent troll is outright disgusting.
Hate Android/Google all you like, but such constructions aren't healthy for a competitive market, they'll just swallow more and more patents, and attack more and more companies, until nobody bothers because of relentless lawsuits as soon as something somewhat popular is produced.
No developer will sleep easy at night when this becomes the default, as an NPE is like a ghost, not subject to the same attacks as a regular business, which makes it so much harder to defeat.
If software can only be developed by the graces or whims of companies like Rockstar Bidco, the software industry will bleed to death in an instant.