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Apple, Others Hit With Lawsuit On Ethernet Patents
bth nods an AppleInsider story on a patent troll who has gotten hold of fundamental Ethernet patents and is wielding them broadly. Three guesses which US Appeals Court the lawsuit was filed in. "A Texas company has targeted a number of technology companies, including Apple, in a new lawsuit regarding a handful of computer networking patents issued in the 1990s. ... 3Com Corporation was granted four patents from 1994 to 1998 pertaining to network adapters. Two deal with the automatic initiation of data transmission, and one addresses 'host indication optimization.' ... The company's Web site states that U.S. Ethernet Innovations was founded 'to continue 3Com Corporation's successful licensing program related to a portfolio of foundational patents in Ethernet technology.' A press release from the company states that it is the 'owner of the fundamental Ethernet technology developed and sold by 3Com Corporation in the 1990s,' suggesting it purchased the patents. ... In addition to Apple, the lawsuit names Acer, ASUS, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett Packard, Sony, and Toshiba as defendants."
Seems to me that asking for a trial by jury may very well backfire on them.
Humour. Try it.
I lost me sig.
I seems to me that by waiting until this late in the game, to the point which nearly the entire world's Internet and telecommunications infrastructure is based on Ethernet in on incarnation or another is just plain sleezy.
The fact that 3Com, once a reputable company of top notch networking technology appears to be trying make money by exercising their patent pool through a 3rd party to raise much needed money. This is sad.
There was a point when the 3Com 3c509 and 3c905 ethernet adapters dominated the Ethernet world. In fact, while their cards were more expensive and more complex than nearly any other on the market, they were likely to be found in nearly every PC that was built of quality parts (meaning machines that chose ASUS motherboards over some fly by night).
The integration of Ethernet logic within chipsets pretty much destroyed the 3Com business model, after all, 3Com made more off the adapters than anything else. Today however nearly every high end motherboard I encounter implements a Marvell Ethernet PHY. Intel is selling tons of Ethernet PHY's to embedded vendors that implement their designs on FPGAs (meaning most high end rack based devices). 3Com is nowhere to be seen.
I have been patiently waiting for 3Com to come back and start taking the high end workstation and the server market seriously. I've been waiting for them to make great products again. Instead, they keep shoveling out lower and lower interest items. The trust the world once associated with their quality is decreasing so rapidly, soon people will see them as no better than Linksys or D-Link.
If I were 3Com, I'd seriously consider taking a project like Vyatta or the likes, start developing it into a high end system capable of managing switching (Layer-2 to Layer-4) and then build every product starting with their cheapest routers based on it. I'd start producing new silicon with high end features like TCP and UDP offloading and trying to get into the mass market PHY business. Most importantly, I'd start selling trust.
The problem is, by exercising these patents which people knew about but trusted 3Com to never exercise since it would just force all the other vendors on the market to lash back at them with their huge patent pools, they're destroying the last remaining bit of trust which was for a long time the only the 3Com had left.
Rest In Peace 3Com, it's unfortunate that everything I ever loved about you is gone. Another great innovator has died. Now you can sleep eternally in a grave dug next to SCOs
Legitimacy of the patents aside, I wonder why an Ethernet technology suit would be leveled against companies that do little more than assemble circuit boards.
Because those companies have money and make some indirect use of the technology. They'd probably sue Coke if they could find a networked vending machine.
I'm starting to think that one of the biggest problems with patents is being able to sell them and hold them with out making products based on them. Well, the US patent system has a lot more problems like obvious things being patented and being able to patent business processes.
But apart from the US,some of the biggest problems come up in companies buying patents and being patent trolls. Patents were supposed to protect the inventor, selling the patent isn't protecting the inventor anymore. Also unless a company merges with another company I think all patents that the company owns should dissolve with the company and be unpatentable.
If you have a patent, I think you should be required to have products out using that patent, or at least working on making products with that patent. Too many companies patent something that they heard someone else speak about, they have no plans to use the patent, just profit off of someone else's work by beating them to the patent office, or just plain having the money to buy the patent where the person doesn't. I guess that still wouldn't quite solve the problem. There would need to be some process where you proved that you created the idea.
*start rant* Now as for the US Patent system, there is an official report that calls it too much of a joke for us to merge our patent system with their's. Our company started looking at US Patents and as far as we can tell, you can't write a line of code with out violating a patent. It is so silly that "If...else" is patented. "ifelse" is patented. "Begin...End" is patented. I think you can get away with "{...}" blocks, but not much else.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Naaa, the biggest problems are pretty much the following:
1)There are no effective checks to stop people patenting obvious things or things that are not patentable. Combined with a complete lack of penalties (at least in practice ) for abusing the system and the expense involved with defending yourself against a lawsuit this allows patent trolls to cause a great deal of harm to companies and individuals who have done nothing wrong.
2)There is in practice a complete lack of punishment for deliberately filing invalid patents and patent claims.
3)Patent law is to a very large extent not based on any form of independent analysis of its consequences but rather the work of lobbying by special interest groups. In otehr words, patent law is designed to be profitable, not just.
4)Because patent law allows very vague and broad interpretations of patent claims, and because you can be found to be infringing even if you had never heard of a plaintiff's patent, it is in practice impossible to market ANY product without infringing on SOME patent.
5)Because large plaintiffs can essentially force smaller companies to settle by simply dragging a case along, the outcome of a lawsuit is often determined not by who is in the right, but who has the most money to spend on legal battles ( this is a more general problem with the US legal system ).
Or simply put: Due to intense lobbying by patent holders and existing monopolies the system is more or less designed to allow plaintiffs to abuse the system for purposes different from the original motivation of promoting arts and sciences. There is little justice or balance in the system and patent lawsuits mostly boil down to who has the deepest pockets rather than who is in the right.