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And the difference is that the Motorola patents are part of a standard, and part of being included in that standard is that they agree to license under FAIR and REASONABLE terms. The amount they asked for was not fair, nor reasonable even by **Motorola's own admission**.

The 2.25% Motorola was asking for was within the norm charged for other standards-essential patents (0.8% - 3.25%).

While I can see an argument that the industry norm is too high and the courts need to bring it down, it's completely untrue that the amount Motorola was asking for was not fair nor reasonable. That's just BS made up by Apple and Microsoft to try to make Motorola look like the bad guy. The amount Motorola requested was within the industry norm, which absent a government-mandated rate is the best measure we have of "fair and reasonable."

Do you think it's Fair for Samsung to demand 2.4% of the total price of the phone -- somewhere around $16 per unit -- for a tweak to the standard implemented by the Infineon baseband processor?

Based on what I've read about the industry and patents, yes it's fair. Here's a PDF on licensing fees for LTE patents, which are also standards-essential patents. Licensing rates for each company's patent portfolio ranges from 0.8% to 3%. And yes that's a percent of the handset price, not for the radio - the paper makes it pretty clear that percentage of handset price is the norm. The "not more than $1 per handset" Apple was insisting on would be less than 0.2%, which is ridiculously low by market standards.

Errm, read that again. "“a reasonable maximum aggregate royalty for LTE essential IPR in handsets is a single-digit percentage of the sales price." - "“[u]nder this proposal no manufacturer should pay more than 5 percent royalties covering all essential WCDMA patents from all patent holders.”

Not 2% for one out of over a thousand patents. Less than 10% for all of them. That would be less than 0.01% of the handsets selling price per patent. Which makes even 2% royalties from the price of the chip completely unreasonable.

PS: Note that the document nowhere says that licensing fees are computed by the selling price of the device - only what their estimated percentage of the selling price would be.

Do you think it's Fair for Samsung to demand 2.4% of the total price of the phone -- somewhere around $16 per unit -- for a tweak to the standard implemented by the Infineon baseband processor?

Based on what I've read about the industry and patents, yes it's fair. Here's a PDF on licensing fees for LTE patents, which are also standards-essential patents. Licensing rates for each company's patent portfolio ranges from 0.8% to 3%. And yes that's a percent of the handset price, not for the radio - the paper makes it pretty clear that percentage of handset price is the norm. The "not more than $1 per handset" Apple was insisting on would be less than 0.2%, which is ridiculously low by market standards.

I would actually chalk this up as a Google win (while simultaneously being a Motorola loss). The reason Motorola was seeking $4 billion was because they were asking a flat 2.25% of the [i]device price[/i]. Products like the Xbox use H.264 as a small subset of their total features, but the norm in the industry seems to be that patent royalties are based on the total device price. This paper on patent royalty rates in the cellular industry puts the total royalty burden of a GSM handset at 10%-40% of the device price.

The judge here decided that, for FRAND patents at least, basing the percentage off the device price was silly, and reduced it accordingly. Arguably that's a much more sane way to do it, considering that devices are becoming more and more multifunctional. Motorola still gets 2.25%, just of the part of the Xbox which uses H.264 instead of the entire Xbox price. If that becomes the norm in the industry, that would be much better for Google and anyone actually making stuff. The losers would be patent trolls and companies which make most of their money licensing their patents instead of building products which use them.

The only issue that remains is the discrepancy between FRAND and regular patents. This decision only covered FRAND patents. If FRAND patent royalties get reduced to a percentage of specific features, while regular patent royalties remain a percentage of the device price, then we will have the backwards situation where a patent on bouncy scrolling and rounded rectangles is worth more than a technical H.264 patent. But that should sort itself out in a few years. If regular patents become worth more than FRAND patents, nobody in their right mind will submit their patent for FRAND anymore and there will be compatibility chaos in all industries. Either regular patents will be reduced to a percentage of specific features as well, or this judge's decision will be overturned and FRAND royalties will return to a percentage of the device price.

Their offer was for the FRAND rate that they offer everyone. It's wasn't unfair, or exorbitant. Citations. Apple wants to pay about 7% of the FRAND rate, or roughly .18% instead of 2.25%.

2.25% of each device is EXACTLY Motorola's published rate for its FRAND patents. Look here if you think otherwise.

And yet, this is how they license it: by percentages. It's how EVERYBODY pays. If you care to look at the PDF, you'll see that the patent holders set their royalties by percentage, and that 2.25% is exactly Motorola's published value for their pool. The problem is that Apple holds no essential patents and isn't willing to cross-license anything, so they don't have much to negotiate here.

Note that the fact that it's percentage based means that the royalties have a higher dollar value on the Galaxy S3 than, say, on the Galaxy Y. But the weight (as in "share of revenue that's passed to others as royalties") on both is exactly the same. This is fair, reasonable, and non discriminatory. Apple just want to have it different because their phones are all in the "expensive" part of the spectrum. Their "expensive" phones can't be treated differently than the "expensive" phones by everybody else.

May I point this out?

Sorry, screwed up the html and lost the link to the LTE royalty rates. Here it is (PDF). And to address the anonymous comment claiming it's a percentage of the cost of the LTE radio, the PDF makes it pretty clear that it's a "percent of the sale price of the handset."

Last things first

The site has lost readership thanks to haters like you who attack anyone who dares to express an alternate viewpoint.

No, this site has lost its readership because it is stuff that doesn't matter that happened last week. This can be tied directly to the "vote for a story" model that was implemented. Things appear everywhere else and then show up on Slashdot last.

Talk about leap of logic. This is a company that bends over for backwards compatibility.

Where were you the last time the driver model changed and printers, scanners, and soundcards (lol, Creative X-Fi) wound up in landfills across the fruited plain? Where were you when Microsoft finally said to the game publishers "Fuck you, you're not writing to hardware anymore"? Microsoft, has, and does, break compatibility when they feel the need to. Paul's article puts an emphasis on this with Metro. The thing is that you have to actually read Paul Thurrott's article and understand just exactly what he's trying to say. He's saying that Metro is a "bet the company" move and there's no going back.

Lastly, I have never said that 7 sucks. You can go through my entire posting history if you wish. It's not just "now."

Indeed, here is me saying nice things about Windows 7.

http://investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=1911&mn=109089&pt=msg&mid=9645884

Now get stuffed.

--
BMO

What is left for the domestic high tech industry?

Selling of its assets.

Two recent examples:

1. AT&T to sell off $100 billion in real estate?

2. AOL hires Evercore to sell patent portfolio

There are some indicators for a botnet behind the WP7 facebook app, which artificially inflates the numbers: http://www.investorvillage.com/mbthread.asp?mb=1911&tid=10271927&showall=1

Except it's based purely on a drop in numbers when the platforms are officially abandoned, a point at which many people will attempt to offload the hardware while it still has some value, which equally explains the drop. I know it doesn't make for much of a conspiracy theory, but oh well.

There are some indicators for a botnet behind the WP7 facebook app, which artificially inflates the numbers: http://www.investorvillage.com/mbthread.asp?mb=1911&tid=10271927&showall=1

There is are a couple of unfortunate wrinkles in what would otherwise be true:

If you don't have money, it scarcely matters what the price of goods is. You are still fucked. For virtually everybody this impecunious, having money = having a job, not selling some bonds or re-allocating your portfolio in the direction of a higher-dividend asset assortment. Given the er... not exactly small... number of people who have fallen off this particular bus(with the additional fun that periods of joblessness do wonders for one's future prospects of being re-hired...) "jobs" as something close to an end in itself does represent a net gain for a substantial number of people.

Secondly, you say that "Ideally you would want a world where you have unlimited energy that required no money (ie jobs). This is true If and Only If the gains from increased efficiency are allocated in a manner that gives you a slice of the expanding pie. If, however, the pie is expanding; but your share of it is shrinking even faster(because whatever you do is an "inefficiency", you are quickly sliding toward point #1.

Empirically, a great many people have reason to be concerned, and to have no particular room to hope that even steady encheapening of goods will allow them to do better than tread water, since labor is definitely one of the goods being encheapened. As this cheery little J.P. Morgan report notes, in a discussion of the improvement of corporate margins: "There are a lot of moving parts in the margin equation, but as shown in the second chart, reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins. This trend has continued; as we have shown several times over the last two years, US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP (see EoTM April 26, 2011)."

Improvements in efficiency do you absolutely no good if somebody with more market power than you have is capturing them. This would appear to be the case. Under such conditions, the people with less market power(ie. about the bottom 95%) don't have a rational interest in efficiency; because they won't capture the gains from it. While(from the perspective of people's actual state of knowledge) the fascination with "jobs" might be largely sentimental populism, it is arguably not economically irrational. If essentially all gains from efficiency(which includes reduction in human resources costs) are being captured by people who aren't you, it is very much in your interest to demand greater inefficiency and attempt to roll back the reduction in demand for you.

Only in a society where everybody has a boat is the fact that the 'rising tide lifts all boats' a comforting one. If a substantial portion of the population is stuck in the mud, the rising tide is not a welcome development...

I don't delete posts that ask for proof that PJ actually exists. The standards that GL holds everyone else do aren't the same standards they hold themselves up to. Strange.

I don't find it a bit surprising. You don't grasp that a lack of image is not tantamount to a lack of identity. You think trolling someone's privacy is the same as analyzing press and legal claims. And then you're all beside yourself, perplexed. Well, Skyline Cowboy, around where I'm from we have a saying; that dog don't hunt. Maybe you can shop it around somewhere else after you tack on another 10K to your bounty.

Reading the comments where it does not get ummm erased is some what more informative at:
http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=1911&clear=1&pt=m

Comments there are not scrutinized as much and therefore more interesting.

Also interesting is the recent removal of MathFox's account and re-attribution of associated comments to Anonymous, given that he was UID #2 and the website admin. That's a lower ID than PJ - she's only #3. Some discussion here.

Here's a related article with covers more details about the list

Suppose you're having a new house built: if you could install a ten or fifteen kilowatt solar plant and inverter for ten grand, you might figure it's worth it to borrow a little more money from the bank.

More and more mortgage companies are financing solar energy systems. Some allow borrowers to borrow more because of such systems. With an alternative energy system installed living costs are reduced so they are willing to lend a higher percent of the what the borrower's income would suggest.

Of course the mortgage crisis does have a negative impact, it has hurt solar businesses.

Falcon

Show me a technology suppressed by the oil companies

Large format NiMH batteries.

Marketed as the Panasonic EV-95. Or rather, not marketed. You can't buy them. The only vehicles they are currently in now (no pun intended) are three hundred some-odd Toyota RAV4-EVs.

If they are ever sold for use to power traction motors in an electric vehicle, Cobasys will slap Panasonic with an injunction to stop. And you can't buy them at any price other than in very large quantities, and the only people who can buy such large quantities are automakers. Some would say "Not a scam" but the licensing of the technology to exclude certain forms of transportation is REAL.

Who's Cobasys? Just the joint venture between the inventor of the battery, ECD Ovonics, and -- wait for it -- Chevron.

Here are a few citations and examples. Although things seem to be getting better, as they are being licensed in some hybrids now, and they may be expanded to more applications in the future...

He said that Kimball was overruled on appeal two thirds of the time. It is, of course, not exactly true.

Somebody went through Judge Kimball's entire summary judgement appeal record and posted it. No, he doesn't get reversed two-thirds of the time.

Over at the Yahoo and InvestorVillage SCOX message boards, we have reason to believe that Dan (or someone that defends him WAY too strongly) has been spending every waking moment trolling for comments from the anti-SCOX crowd... every time he gets brought up, a cadre of fake Indians comes along trying to drown out the discussion.
(If you don't think that's possible, we already know that SCOX supporters (like Mike Anderer), employees (like Erik Hughes and Ryan Tibbetts), and Darl's wife, if not actually Darl, have posted there - search the Yahoo SCOX board for the account names treycc, anmcbride, pathetic_geeks, and tibbcat.

One of my cohorts there, Tim, has written an excellent summary of why Dan Lyons is deserving of nothing but the same utter contempt that I hold for the management and fellow yellow journalists and shills the The SCO Group used to spread this FUD campaign. You can read it here;

http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=1911&pt=msg&mn=44164

Here's an excerpt...

"...The "money quote", as Dan likes to put it, in his "mea culpa" is this:

>

Translation: *Please*, for the love of God, *ignore* all *the other stuff* I have yet to apologize for! Also, *pretend* that the *misrepresentations* I'm insulting your intelligence with (I was "poking fun"! Yeah, that's the ticket!) in this empty gesture aren't just more sophistry! When I say that the "truth" is "simply this", what I mean is *do not look anywhere else*!

As much as Lyons would like the "truth" to be "simply this", I feel that perhaps we are doing the "truth" a disservice by *omitting* all the other stuff Dan has written in the last few years that his "mea culpa" studiously avoids (notice he doesn't provide links to the articles he does mention? Go figure). I guess misrepresenting his Revenge of the Nerds as "poking fun" felt like enough BS per character, or however he rationalizes it..."

The bottom line is this - Dan is a hack, and he's as bad at apologizing as he is at being Fake Steve Jobs, let alone the possibility of pretending to be an outraged fake Indian; no integrity, no intellect, and if he insists on snuggling up to Steve Ballmer, no future.
-the saltydog aka saltydogmn

To Patrick Byrne:

I read Judd Bagley's posts on AntiSocialMedia.net (referenced above by you).

Veni, Vidi, Wiki? (dated 09/25/06) says:

"Please note that what follows is my recounting of a story very recently related to me by the subject, Patrick Byrne, with his permission. I invite Mr. Byrne to follow up with any corrections or clarifications that may be warranted."

A Peek into the Mind of Wikipedia's SlimVirgin (dated 09/27/06) says:

"EDITOR'S NOTE: As I feared, my recollection of Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne's past experiences with Linda Mack (aka SlimVirgin) did not get it quite right.

Byrne recently emailed me a fuller, written version of the story which I intended to add as a comment on the original post; however, due to its length (and quality), I've opted instead to publish it here.

After reading Byrne's account, all I can say is: my version really sucked and you owe it to yourself to read what follows, in its entirety."

Question:
Did you lie when you stated on 12/31/06 on InvestorVillage that:

"I am not behind antisocialmedia.com, offer it no support, it has nothing to do with overstock. Technically, I do not "know" who out there is behind it (the person who is behind it has made an effort to shield me from that knowledge), though admittedly, I have a very good idea."

Link here: http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=3532&mn =2964&pt=msg&mid=1084880

Respectfully,

Sam E. Antar (former Crazy Eddie CFO & convicted felon)

How the fuck is this funny?!? It's 100 % accurate, not "funny".
You probably got modded "funny" by our resident MSFT astroturfers... oh, and Darl McBride can bite my shiny metal ass.

Also, in other news, the saltydog, aka saltydogmn, has no immediate plans to ever spend another dime on Microsoft products, ever again.

I wrote a small blurb here; http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=1911&mn =30530&pt=msg&mid=2131179 ...

http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=4326&pt =m

The IBM message board over at InvestorVillage seems to be ignoring this story ever since it broke last week. Usually the message boards are the first to jump on every unfounded rumor. It just seems that this story has zero credibility.

I begin to wonder if it was made up by a guy called Darl.

http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=4326&pt =m

IBM's stock is close to its 52 week high and there don't seem to be rumors over on InvestorVillage. All quiet on the western front.

The serious Yahoo! AMD posters moved to InvestorVillage after Yahoo! changed to their awful new format. Only spammers and boiler-room drones are left at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! AMD board was one of the most active stock boards on Yahoo! until Yahoo! ruined it.

Anyhow, the general consensus at IV is that the buyout rumor is FUD. Maybe someone will buy a minority stake, AMD wouldn't mind having more cash to build fabs with, but that's about it. The stock is undervalued though, what with the Barcelona cores coming and the new ATI chips on their way.

> Incorrect. It's a contract case. The only copyright infringement claim
> The SCO Group is making has to do with IBM continuing to distribute AIX
> after TSG supposedly terminated IBM's irrevocable, perpetual, fully paid
> up SysV license.

Sorry, but it's you that's wrong Mr Hasler.
Here's a breakdown of those Items that remain:

1 (JFS in Linux): Contract claim
2 (RCU in Linux): Contract claim
23 (Dynix EES in Linux): Contract claim, negative know-how
43 (Dynix TCP in Linux): Contract claim, negative know-how
90 (Dynix EES in Linux): Contract claim, negative know-how
94 (NUMA/SMP in Linux): Contract claim
113-142 (SPIE test suite in Linux): Contract claim
150-164 (STREAMS in Linux): Copyright claim
183-184 (Single Unix Specification ABI header files in Linux): Copyright claim
185 (atemalloc in Linux): Copyright claim
186-192 (misc Dynix stuff in Linux): Contract claim
194-203 (Monterey in AIX for Power): Copyright claim
204 (SysV in Dynix): Copyright claim
205-231 (Single Unix Specification material in Linux): Copyright claim
272-278 (ELF in Linux): Copyright claim

Total remaining items 106
Contract items 43, copyright items 63
Linux items 95, Dynix items 1, AIX items 10

Source: http://www.zen77087.zen.co.uk/nug/alleg/viols.shtm l

For informed discussion, forget Groklaw's red dress worshipping zombie horde.
Go to the SCOX forum at Investor Village
http://www1.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=1911&p t=m&clear=1

Judging from the growth in orders placed on the iTunes Music Store, the service is growing quickly in popularity. It's hard to comport these figures with a view that iPod users are "shunning" the service.

Year Orders
2004 25197527 100%
2005 91757221 364%
2006 266794136 1059%