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Nokia Claims Patent Violations in Most Apple Products
An anonymous reader writes with an extract from this Associated Press story, as carried by The Globe and Mail: "Nokia is broadening its legal fight with Apple, saying almost all of the company's products violate its patents, not just the iPhone. Nokia Corp. said Tuesday that it has filed a complaint against Apple Inc. with the US International Trade Commission. The Finnish phone maker says Apple's iPhone, iPods and computers all violate its intellectual property rights."
Your point is well made. Large companies like Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc maintain huge patent portfolios and have extraordinarily complicated cross-licensing arrangements that would take an army of outside attorneys decades to fully decipher. It's largely a defensive measure; as you pointed out, poking at Apple with a stick is likely to result in Apple bludgeoning them with a log.
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You are aware that Nokia has been around since the 19th century and have a much larger patent portfolio than Apple, right? Nokia's amount of R&D dwarfs the amount Apple does.
That might be the case, but only patents filed in the past 20 years are relevant (20 years being generally the longest period for a patent, in any country). For this reason what matters is not how much innovation a company had done since their existence, but how much it has been innovating and filing in the past 20 years.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Software engineering is done by writing code, and should be afforded protection under copyright laws, not patents.
A huge cornerstone of many open source licenses depend on their work being copyrightable, and not patentable.
Nokia has the largest market share, why do they have to catch up? The real thing is that Apple has to catch up and probably has used tecnology owned by Nokia illegally.
And at least on Slashdot we should value Nokia's hardware patents a little more than software patents. They spent real money on research. On the contrary, patenting "do something on user click" is not really that useful for the progress of human race...
These are not physical as you can kick them. They are physical as Nokia in Nokia has actual product using them. Nokia has actually developed heaps of technology because they were very early to market (GSM, UMTS, etc were to a large extent developed by Nokia and Ericsson), so the patents cover a lot of actual technology that's widely used.
Nokia spent heaps of money developing many of the technologies that make cell-phones work, and the rest of the industry has to pay to make of for the R&D. That way everybody gets better products; Nokia has an incentive to do the R&D because they can make back the money and the rest because they can purchase the technology cheaper.
This is an excellent example of why the patent system was developed; everybody benefits by allowing Nokia patents on their technologies.
As for Apple... Multi-touch... Well, I've worked with that for almost a decade now...
Indeed, the only catagory Apple wins with in smart-phones is in the single-device category, and the blackberry 8300 series (5 devices that are essentially the same phone in different configurations) is just a hair behind the iPhone 3g. RIM has over 40% of the smartphone market, a number Apple can't touch.
Nokia does ok in the smartphone market, but their bread and butter is the general handset market, of which they control more than half of the entire market.
Apple is not the big guy in this battle, Nokia is. Apple has, what, four variations of the same phone? Nokia has thousands. They have been in the business long enough that they may well have a case against Apple computers as well, since a phone is really nothing more than a small computer anyway.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I'd be very surprised if Apple were the big dog in this fight, given that Nokia has been designing and manufacturing cell phones for decades (verses just a couple years for Apple), has a very large patent portfolio in the cell phone realm on such trivial technologies as GSM and the like, and has almost 500 times the cell phone market share that Apple has.
Seriously, Nokia is not just a behemoth in the cell phone realm, it is THE behemoth. Sony-Ericsson, the next largest cell phone manufacturer, has less than 1/3 Nokia's market share.
Also, patent trolling is buying up patents and springing lawsuits on companies when one of them gains sufficient momentum. That is not what Nokia did. Nokia does original research and developement in cell phone technology, it's why they are the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. Nokia offered licensing terms and Apple didn't like them. Just because Apple doesn't like the terms does not mean they get to ignore the patents. Apples only legal options were to accept the terms or not use the infringing technology, they did neither and now they have been sued.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I would be very surprised if licensing deals with Sony Ericsson, Motorola, etc. don't include some amount of cross-licensing.
In which case demanding the same from Apple is exactly the Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory thing.
One that hath name thou can not otter
This is merely Apple's argument, not fact.
Whether the argument is valid is down to the courts, and the GSM association to decide. Even then you may note that in those very quotes Apple themselves note that they were offered a different, much lower figure originally but still refused it citing it was excessive.
So the question for the courts/GSM association is, were the rates every really excessive, or is that just a convenient excuse that Apple has been using to try and actually pay an unreasonably low fee?