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U.S. Bans Some Cellphones For Patent Reasons
runner_one writes "According to the New York Times, A federal agency has banned imports of new cellphones made with Qualcomm semiconductors because the chips violate a patent held by Broadcom. The International Trade Commission said today that the import ban would not apply to mobile phone models that were imported on or before June 7." Update: 06/08 13:05 GMT by KD : Glenn Fleishman notes that Apple's iPhone will be allowed into the country, since it doesn't use any 3G chips. He adds that Apple "might have the most advanced smartphone on the market unless President Bush or his trade representative overturn the ruling (which they have the power to do)."
That fine i'm pretty sure some other countries will take them cheap phones!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Play with patent fire and you're going to get burned. Remember Qualcomm suing Nokia?, Qualcomm suing GTE Wireless, Qualcomm suing Maxim, Qualcomm suing Motorolla, Qualcomm suing Ericsson, Qualcomm suing Broadcom?
Everytime a large corporation loses a big case like this, I feel we're a step closer to sane patent reform. Hopefully someone will win a patent against Broadcomm next.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I am wondering how this might effect travelers arriving in the US with such a phone. I would imagine only a vanishingly small minority would have any idea what semiconductors powered their phone. It would certainly be a shock to arrive and have your phone confiscated.
being prompty arrested for violating the dmc-whatever.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
Maybe I'm just on the left side of the bell curve, but what technology exactly is effected by this ruling? What phones use these chips? I haven't seen very many qualcomm phones so I assume others are using their chips...
Get a web developer
Every time they issue a patent that's later invalidated, they should pay compensation for issuing the patent.
The problem here, has and always will be the over willingness of the patent office to issue patents when the invention preexists but is not documented publicly, or where it's a minor increment of an existing variation. It's in the law that they have to test for obviousness and prior art, but they so narrowly define those terms as to remove the tests.
The free market will fix it, make them pay for their mistakes just like every other professional body.
It says that it found a violation on U.S. Patent No. 6,714,983. Here's the link to the patent.
One thing to note is that the ITC investigates and makes recommendations to congress and the president. It's not actually a court of law or policy making body. So I think this from the article: isn't really true. Especially when later in the article it states that the government has 60 days to approve or overturn the order made by the ITC.
Did Qualcomm employees actually read Broadcom's patent and use the helpful diagrams to build the phone chips? I rather suspect not - this is another example of independent discovery. I understand that the patent law doesn't allow that as a defense, as it's hard to prove that someone didn't read the publicly available patent. But the fact that it happens over and over again just shows that the current system blocks progress of art and science rather than encouraging it. We have to start only allowing patents that are judged non-obvious by leading experts in the area.
I just read the abstract (I know, bad form on slashdot...). Admittedly it's only the abstract, but it sounds remarkably like an abstraction layer.
What is it with Broadcom? This sounds like the same kinda rubbish that is stopping my wireless from working natively in Linux.
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
After skimming the patent I'm failing to see the IP. Claim 1 basically describes a linking of attempt rate to success rate... and isn't that like the exponential backoff of ethernet? The fact that they then tie this to turning on and off a periphial (the power hungry transmitter) is the kind of optimization that laptop driver authors have been doing of years... so while prior art in the field of mobile phones may be thin on the ground there are examples all over the place.
:)
The primary and secondary examiner are listed... has anyone found an online resource that provides ranks or rates these guys? Some googling turns up proposals for community participation in the patent review process but nothing like a 'hot or not' site for examiners
a recent ruling in the uk stated that compensation should be paid on a patent that's been granted even if that patent is subsequently found to be invalid.
Now that sucks
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Oh, sorry this is slashdot. Time for an iPhone!
Can you hear me now???
"A pritable data terminal includes at least two communication transeivers having different operating charactrtistics, one for conducting data communications on a wired sub-network and one for conducting data communications on a wireless subnetwork"
So basically they patented all wired and wireless networks. Isn't just a case of a US company using legislation to impede competitors entry into the market. The whole TRIPS thing being designed so any future non-US telecom company will have to pay a tithe to Washington just to sell their own technology. Pax Americana rules everywhere.
was Re:ITC press release
davecb5620@gmail.com
Qualcomm has been aggressive in promoting their patent rights. But to say
that they are unique in this field is completely ignoring one side of the story.
Every try to make something in the GSM/UMTS space? You will have about a dozen companies
approach you with their hands out. Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericcson, Motorola, Lucent, Samsung
and several others. CDMA royalties are about 5%, almost all paid to Qualcomm. GSM/UMTS
royalties sum up to about 18%. The only difference is that if you are one of the big guys,
you "cross-license" your patents so that you don't end up actually paying anything. If you
are a new entrant... well, you are out of luck.
What is pissing off the Nokias, Ericcsons and Broadcomms of the world is that in the CDMA space,
they have no patents at all. None. That is because they fought CDMA every step of the way until Qualcomm
demonstrated conclusively that it is a commercially practical technology. Then they
turned around and tried to claim it as their own, and tried to co-opt it by applying it with minor
modifications to the UMTS space.
Actually, I am amazed that Broadcomm is getting away with this. Their sum total of contributions to
the wireless space is close to zero. They have done some work in the wireline world in the early
years, but they have contributed zip, zilch, nada in the development of wireless IP. They are not
even a name in the industry. HOwever, it is possible that they have purchased some IPR of late.
I am quite happy to see cracks in the patent edifice as a whole, but making Qualcomm the villain in
this is not correct. Qualcomm laid many of the foundations for modern wireless communications technology;
Qualcomm corporate R&D is about as close as you can get to how Bell Labs used to be.
Lots of Qualcomm's IPR consists of non-trivial, non-obvious, fundamental contributions to communications
theory. Most other wireless companies, in particular Nokia, Motorola, Ericcson etc have done nothing
fundamental in the past 15 years. They are product companies whose forte consists of taking old technologies
and packaging them in crowd-pleasing form factors, or (in the case of Ericcson), maintaining relationships
with behemoth carriers.
Magnus
US market: 300 million people
Asian market: 2,000 million people
I postulate the US of the future will be a technological backwater in the coming years with it's trade policies and legal foolishness.
If it is to hard to sell in the US, so what... there is a whole new up and coming world out there (ironically fueled by US economic suicide.)
The US once led the world in industrial output.
Then we decided that we would move industry overseas, and our primary output would be capital manipulation.
Now, we've decided that we'll neither make things or manipulate capital, but instead sue people who actually make things, move capital, invent things, or make entertainment. Parasites on the world.
The next step for the top 5 percenters is to just sit in a chair and demand people give them stuff because they deserve it for being them. What do we need them for? Disband their corporations for national security reasons. No further reason is necessary once you invoke that, and really, it's true. These pigs are a threat to national and world security. They are choking human progress. They are the highwaymen with nice two thousand dollar suits. We don't need them.
The real question at this point I don't see being asked is, how likley is this to be overturned? Since it has such a broad impact, I would think that the thought might be to overturn this - yet at the same time, you can't just trample on patent owners rights from above every time they become inconvenient, if you were being an idealist you would let the ruling stand and them demand expidited review of the patents in question to be sure they were valid, or overturn them. If they are held to be valid under closer revue then in fact it would seem fair they should stand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just got one on Tuesday. There's a nice "QUALCOMM 3G CDMA" right on the back of the phone.
I guess they'll just have to sell (QCOM) phones outside USA - HAHAAAHAAAHAAAAA!!!!
You obviously have not been paying attention to the latest HSDPA celphones such as the upcoming HTC Kaiser. The successor to the HTC TyTN aka Cingular 8525.
, or use the PDAmaster link and search for just UMTS 850/1900/2100, and quad-band GSM (true world-phones) so any using that Qualcomm chipset are screwed for their upcoming June through October release dates.
It uses Qualcomm's variation of the ARM cpu with Qualcomm's media accelerator and Qualcomm's A-GPS chip in one.
Most of the these new UMTS/HSDPA phones are tri-band (2100 + 850/1900MHz) http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=pdalist&list=phone3g
This ruling is based off a Broadcom patent that should never have been granted in the first place regarding searching for a signal in areas without service. Searching takes power, so it's useful to search as infrequently as possible. Basically, when the phone can't find a signal it waits for X ms, then tries again. If it still can't find a signal, it waits 2X, then tries again. Then 4X, then 8X, etc... This incredibly obvious "algorithm" was granted a patent.
Qualcomm used the same procedure in it's chips because it was the obvious thing to do to save power, and has now been found guilty of violating their patent. There's no question they are violating that patent, it just shouldn't be a patent in the first place!. Anyone ever heard of TCP backoff? Send data, if it doesn't work decrease size by 2X, then 4X, then 8X . . . sound familiar?
Regardless of all of this, Qualcomm lost, but the implications in the summary are misleading. Qualcomm lost this case months and months ago, and although the punishment was just announced they already knew they were going to have to stop using that "algorithm." As a result NONE of the chips being sold currently for use in the US use this "algorithm," so none of them are in violation, so they can be imported freely without any regard to this ruling.
This ruling has almost no impact for Qualcomm (aside from the work already done to implement the work-around).
Unless I'm mistaken Apple uses TCPA to restrict MacOS X from booting on non-authorized (i.e. non-Apple) hardware.
Logic Pro 7.x has a USB hardware dongle.
full of strange square shapes and wires connected inside, AND are carry-ons in the passenger space.
Is it easy to differentiate between a laptop battery and say a brick of C4, or even a combo of?