Apple's Billion Dollar Patent & Other Stories From Patentland

DECS writes "It has been widely reported that Apple secured a patent worth a "billion dollars." According to a patent attorney involved in the issue, Apple will be "after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties." The good news is that all the news reports were based on misleading hyperbole. " Don't let the title fool you; the essay is a good background on patents, the horror stories of some of them but also why companies feel compelled to seek patents as a business "safety" precaution.

Comments

Not getting it

[AKAImBatman]

The story contains some great facts for people who are unaware, but the author doesn't seem to be going anywhere with it. First he talks about the "billion dollar patent" then goes off on a tangent about IP without ever explaining how any of it ties back into the original issue.

I'd give it an A for research, but a C- for usefulness.

Also, what is up with the "we're being censored by Digg" bit at the end? Following his Digg links, it seems like everything is working fine. The only thing I found on the subject was this accusation claiming that Roughly Drafted is trying to game digg. The only thing I can figure is that some of the new algorithms (which favor users who have gotten stories to the front page) killed the stories from getting to the front page. Whether someone is gaming the system or not, he needs more established users in order to get his stories to the front page.

Re:Not getting it

[DECS]

Hi - Thanks for the A. I described patent law and Apple's disasterous pit of litigation in 1988-1994 to answer the claim that Apple will, as the patent attorney says, convert from a hardware company to a patent lawsuit machine.

The www.roughlydrafteded.com site is censored by Digg, not because stories are ranked poorly, but because the system automatically bars URL submissions from sites that have had a given number of submitted articles buried.

The anonymous poster of your link (ba01162.googlepages) is "Lackawack," a Digg user who announced he would set up a "vigalante army" of fake accounts on Digg and take down any articles that had been submitted from RoughlyDrafted. That was in response to unflattering reviews and general taunting of the Zune.

That resulted in Lackawack getting his user banned on Digg, but he immediately resurfaced as lackawack2 and started buring old articles that had been on the front page. He also attacked everyone digging any RDM articles. He started keeping a McCarthy list of "suspicious Digg users" who digg RDM articles, which is the page you advertise in your post.

Of course, if any of those users were fake, lackawack2 could have just submitted them to Digg and the site would ban them. Since he couldn't do that, he just raised a FUD screen of "sounds suspicious!!!" and kept working to bury old stories until enough articles on Digg had been sequentially banned so that Digg blocked further submissions.

That mechanism is designed to prevent domains from dumping a bunch of junk into Digg, but it is entirely worthless, as plenty of spam anonyblog domains caputure Digg's front page. All the "top 10 lists of stuff you already know" that link to anonymous googlepages full of Adsense, or domains all run by the same group of pay for say astroturfers (some of which have been outted on RDM) happily consume much of Digg's bandwidth.

The thing is, if you need to repress someone else's speech with your own noise, you're probably lying. I try to contribute original, worthwhile writing on subjects to balance the sensationalist and often poorly thought out press release regurgiations that are much easier and profitable to do. If you don't like my stuff, you can ignore it, but presenting a liar's troll campaign as a credable attack is just lame.

The vast majority of comments on RDM articles on Digg were very positive. It is only the miniority of anonymous trolls there who want to censor opinions that fail to hail everythign from Microsoft with effusive kowtowing. Digg just has systems in place that allows that type of abuse. That's making it increasingly less interesting to use Digg.

NewsFactor looks interesting.

it's interesting that they say apple isn't...

[jimstapleton]

interested in initiating lawsuits except in self defense from other lawsuits.

Guess the author never heard of the "FreeType" library, I believe Apple threatened to sue them for the parts of their text rendering engine, that allowed them to effectively do things like antialiasing. Apple also, as mentioned in the article, tried to sue Microsoft for various violations.

He also never mentioned what the actual patent was about did he?

The article seems to have very little to do with the title, and the evidence is lackluster for the case, at best.

Re:it's interesting that they say apple isn't...

[gandreas]

Apple never sued FreeType - see FreeType's own account about this myth
The patents Apple has in TrueType also have to do with grid-fitting of curves, and not antialiasing - basically a way to provide hints to adjust control points for curves on limited resolution contexts, effectively so that you don't have to do any antialiasing (which on a B&W device is impossible).

Cheaper To Fight It

[DrKyle]

If I was one of the corporations that Apple tried to extort by buying this patent I would just form a nice alliance of lawyers with the other "infringers" and fight the thing tooth and nail. There is probably a better chance of spending 100 million getting the patent voided than giving Apple a billion and bending over.

Re:Eli Whitney cared

[Anonymous Coward]

The cotton gin is the perfect example. After all, it was invented? So the system did not make him rich. BFD. Had he NOT spent his time trying to collect royalties (rent seeking), and instead produced value, then maybe he would have faired better. Back then, the big guys took his shit and ran with it. Add 200 years of reform and what happens: the big guys just take shit and run with it. No matter how clever your patent, if you try to sell something using it, other aspects of your device may be covered by one thousand other patents in the hands of big business. I.e., good luck.

Re:Article doesn't identify the patent. Here it is

[blhack]

that is a big deal. This is apple taking what is more or less the standard way of interfacing with a media device, patenting it, and then taking people to court if they don't want to change. Lets say i start a laptop manufacturer. My laptops are okay, but still don't really sell very much. Well lets say that I use the money that i have made to hire a bunch of lawyers. We find out that it has not been patented to power a laptop with a portable source of power. So we patent it, then sue everybody who doesn't stop using batteries. What apple has patented is just the logical way of doing it. I guess that is a business tactic. Its just a very slimy one, and a very good example of how patents can be very very bad.

Re:Apple got a patent on not playing games

[VGPowerlord]

Wow, you're a bright one aren't you? Take a look at Mac hardware... it's practically IDENTICAL to PC hardware, including that of graphics processors. The problem isn't hardware, it's software companies not willing to port games on mac. And from what I've seen since I bought my MacBook, any games that are on here run so damn well that it's not funny.

It's also been that way for all of a year now?

Then again, software these days rarely, if ever, interact directly with the hardware. APIs are what matters now, and unfortunately APIs are something Microsoft has in spades.

Microsoft pushes for developers on Windows to use DirectX so that the game they create aren't portable. If they were to use OpenGL, or even worse for Microsoft, SDL, they could build portable games. Do you really think Microsoft wants that?