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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)."
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 believe the issue is with import to sell, not importing the phone for your personal use in business/vacation (and bringing it back home with you).
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
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.
If you have a Sprint phone chances are you've seen a "Digital by Qualcomm" logo/sticker somewhere on it. (The exception being the Treos)
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.
A few HTC Smart Phones use Qualcomm Chips IIRC. The new HTC Kaiser (slide out keyboard w/flip up screen, GPS, WM 6) has a Qualcomm Chip core powering it, doing the GPS and also Graphics, so unless this is overturned people in the states are going to miss out on a funky little device.
I am NaN
I think a few USPTO people should go to Guano bay for not doing their duty.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
Don't worry too much, if the authorities are going to arrest people just because they have bought something that in one way or another violates an IP, they should just declare the whole Earth as a prison. For all I know my travelling mug could be violating some.
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
Yep, Ewan go and tell that to US customs. Same for "I am not really bringing that phone for resale".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
If you need a state-protected monopoly to turn a profit, maybe your invention wasn't so damned good after all...
Money for nothing, pix for free
Here's a hypothetical situation:
Company A spends 5 million dollars researching how to design and manufacture widgets. They release it into the market. Company B then buy one of the first run, spends 100,000 dollars reverse engineering it, and sells it for 25% of the price Company A offers. Company A now goes out of business.
It's really not that hard to understand, unless you're on Slashdot, where everything someone else came up with is obvious and stupid, but only once they've come up with it.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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
Maybe a terrorist has hidden a lithium-ion battery in the phone.
They're explosive you know. ^_^
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Patents try to solve an unsolvable problem today in that they need to be short in duration to minimize the chilling effects, but long to earn their owners cash; broad to be applicable, but narrow to avoid carpet bombing; easy to understand to be of use for others and patent examiners, but obfuscated to prevent information leakage to countries with no patent system and we need a cheap, fast AND thorough patent examination process. Ain't gonna happen.
Enough studies indicate that the only ones actually benefiting from patents in real life (outside purely hypothetical situations like the other replicant gave) are patent attorneys that I'm willing to give it a try without them. Just let the current ones expire and stop granting new ones. We already see less and less patent applications from real entrepreneurs and innovators and more and more applications from patent hoarders so this step should be a no-brainer. Patents do not work like they are supposed to. I'm unsure as to if they ever actually did. For instance, it has been suggested that they delayed the industrial revolution several decades, until James Watt's steam engine patent expired. http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:bSn6RfryVEgJ:w
Hell, just look at Switzerland and the Netherlands a hundred years ago - for a period of over 50 years, neither country had a patent system and they flourished. Many large corporations were founded there at the time; Unilever, Syngenta, Philips and Nestlé.
"The two countries relied for their growth not upon exclusive rights but upon high educational standards and technical ability." http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7
Money for nothing, pix for free
Asia is large and growing rapidly, but a huge portion of that growth is driven by sales to the US market - remember that the US economy is more than five times the size of the Chinese economy, and nearly twice the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean economies combined. Loss of access to the US market would be a huge lose/lose for both Asian economies AND the US.
Try to enter the United States through Pearson International Airport. Everybody whom I've spoken to that has done it (as well as myself) have experienced nothing but rudeness and/or incompetence from the Customs officials. Out of six times (once per year), I have only had one Customs officer who wasn't rude, or at least downright grumpy. Additionally, if they think that they can hold something over your head, they will (and they've threatened refusal to let me back in to the U.S. before).
One Customs officer, after approving me, as I was about to walk away said, "You should watch C-Span - I hear that they're about to revoke a bunch of H1s in your (software) field".
The most pleasant experience I had was entering San Francisco from a foreign country - no issues at all, the process was fast and smooth, and the officer was very pleasant.
I await the nightmare that shall be Pearson International in a few weeks when I'm sure I'll get a Customs officer who has no idea how to handle an "Adjustment of Status".
-- Joe
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
How is the iPhone the most advanced when it doesn't have a 3g chip? Im sure all those cool features will work great at 80kbps..... NOT