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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."
Apple has been patenting things for a long time. If they look really hard, I suspect they will find hundreds of patents that Nokia is using without compensation.
Kind of a neat way to maintain high public exposure, but can it be cheaper than regular advertising? Aside from the freebie here on the front page? Only their accountants know for sure.. I gotta admit.. the drama angle plays pretty good.. cliffhangers and everything.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I can tell you one patent Apple uses without even turning on iPhone. iPhone has no visible antenna right? Guess who shipped such device first and spent some years to convince people that the external antenna isn't really better than the internal one?
The issue Apple faces is that the patents Nokia were originally pursuing were patents that every single other mobile manufacturer was happy to license.
Actually no. Nokia wanted Apple to give them much more than "every other single" manufacturer. Nokia wanted to charge Apple 3x the fair and reasonable rate they charged others. They also wanted free access to Apple tech. Here are just a few of Apple's complaints:
...In or about May 2009, Nokia demanded a royalty approximately three times as much as the royalty proposed the prior spring, which was itself in excess of a F/RAND rate, as well as “picks’ to Apple’s non-standards-essential patents.
Article 81. In Particular, in or about the spring of 2008, Nokia demanded that, as part of it’s compensation for licensing Nokia’s portfolio of purported essential patents, Apple must grant Nokia a license to a particular number of Apple non-standards-essential patents...Apple immediately rejected the proposal and reiterated Apple’s position that Nokia’s F/RAND obligations required it to licence Nokia’s purportedly essential technologies.
Article 82.
Naughty Nokia. Go to your room.
Apple is not a GSM Association member. They had nothing to do with developing GSM, and so don't have claim to the favorable RAND terms available to GSM Association members.
If Nokia wanted more in exchange for the use of their patents than other GSM patent holders do, then that is their right. If Apple doesn't want to pay Nokia's terms, they need to find a way around the patents. If that's what they did, then Apple will win. If they didn't, well, you don't get to just say "Your patent isn't important" and ignore it.
Claiming that other Apple products violate their patents is just more posturing to try and force a settlement on terms that are very unfavorable to Apple.
That's assuming Apple products don't violate Nokia patents. If they do violate the patents, then Nokia's position is completely legitimate, and Apple refused to license Nokia's patents and went ahead and infringed them.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You've long been able to patent processes and not just specific implementations of a process, at least in the US (and possibly other places, I haven't done the research to know). And by "long" I mean "more than a century" -- there was a USSC case involving a process for refining flour that addressed just this distinction (Cochane v. Deemer, 1877). The majority opinion there says "A process may be patentable, irrespective of the particular form of the instrumentality used.”
So what I want to know is why processes implemented in software are different than processes implement in other hardware, bearing in mind that the later have been eligible for patents for at least 132 years. Or if software and hardware implementations of processes aren't different, what in society has changed to that would make us want to overturn our traditional patent rules.
Software patents are more like patenting the idea of a mouse trap rather than a specific apparatus for trapping mouses.
No, both of those are legitimate subject matter for a patent. If you are the first person ever to conceive of the idea of building a trap to catch mice, then you can get a broad patent on mouse traps. If mouse traps are already in the prior art, you can get a patent on your improved mouse trap. Copyright would apply to a diagram or schematic of your mouse trap. A copyright on your schematic would not prevent me from building the trap described by the schematic. It just keeps me from copying the schematic itself. But a patent on your design does keep me from making your mouse trap, regardless of whether or not I actually copy the schematic. Extrapolating out to software is not difficult and is left as an exercise for the reader.
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I think you're failing to see how the steps in the process differ from physical invention: It's not that software is implemented based on predefined components, it's a question of where creativity is possible in the process (I'm using creativity in a broad sense, to include the word invention itself, and words such as 'originality' and even 'non-obviousness' when they are used to describe the patent process. I'll try to use some of those more specific terms to make this a little clearer).
As post #30588846 put it, the assembly of code is done in preconcieved ways. Someone already built a hardware framework that controls what you can create in software for a given purpose at one set of levels (essentially the bottommost levels - you can't, for example, make a deliberate spelling mistake to make a pun or coin a new word to create something novel and previously unforseen, as the system treats these as mistakes which won't execute). There are many non-obvious but still useful ways to arrange a very complex set of logic gates to make a processor, ergo that is patentable (or some parts of it are). There are no similarly non-obvious ways to arrange assembly language commands - A C, L, or ST, or even an SSCH does what it does, and its permissible uses are all documented. When you program above machine and assembly languages, you can't rearrange these to your own taste, as you can't even normally see them.
At the next set of levels, someone has created a programming language you are using. Unlike a natural language, it too is a very rigidly defined framework. Some choices may seem to be available, but there is often a precise ranking possible, in that one algorythm may be clearly superior to all others for the purpose. Doing something deliberately different is mostly also doing something deliberately inefficient, against standard, or just plain wrong. At neither of these two sets of levels can you actually do much if anything significantly creative. You also can't protect that level by patent because the legal system already forbids protecting the mathematics on which your work is based, and your implementation is a derivitive work of the sphere of math, so it can't have rights the math itself doesn't have.
Above that second set of levels, yes programming can be creative. But there, you're describing something similar to writing in a natural language. It's normally already protectable by copyright and so shouldn't gain simultanious protection from patent law. Some choices here are non-obvious, but non-obvious in more like the same way as choosing to use adjectives more sparingly and make the red-headed character be from out of state, not so much non-obvious in the 'tungsten makes a durable filament' manner.
I'm not saying I actually agree with all this, mind you. I think one of the points of both open ended scripting languages and of OOP is to make genuine creative choice available at deeper levels of the process. But, the court system is thinking of programming mostly as it was 20 or more years ago.
Who is John Cabal?
That's why it was so amusing to see Apple copying the LG's Prada phone design for the Iphone.
FWIW, the Prada was announced December 2006, one month before the iPhone. They had both clearly been in development for awhile -- Wikipedia says the iPhone was in development for at least 2.5 years, though no word on the Prada's development time. Hard to imagine that your assertion is true.
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Most of the Nokia patents are old, non-obvious and already established. Its not like patents on "doing thing x, but this time on the internet!". Why Apple decided to spit in Nokias face i dont really understand. They cant win this one, especially since the US is trying to get software patents acknowledged in the EU. Now is really not the time to play the protectionist game so i dont think political pressure will be put into the courts.
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