Slashdot Mirror
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."
So is Slashdot posters going to be consistent in their anti-patent stances or are they going to make excuses about how this is okay because it's going after Apple (like they do when Microsoft gets sued for patent infringement).
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.
I highly suspect Apple will soon pull out their patent portfolio and this will quickly turn into a total mess. Oh well, bound to happen sooner or later.
Dear Nokia,
I hope you can show clear proof that you've continually tried to engage Apple - throughout the production of each of their infringing products ... to re-iterate your position. If you have not, I hope you LOSE this case. If you did, you deserve to WIN this case. Failure to protect your patents until they are well established should be automatic disqualification of a patent.
Sincerely,
The Internet Community
Does this mean that Steve Jobs will also lose person of the decade?
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
The old "All your base are belong to us" way of technology progression.
One of the patents that Apple is countersuing on is this one:
No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface
Sounds to me like rabid software patenting.
Source- http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/12/apple_nokia_sto.html
I clicked the link and got six sentences. Is this what qualifies as slashdot newsworthy these days?
Seems to be up to his neck in legal alligators lately.
Cellphone search without warrant declared illegal by Ohio Supreme Court
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26sat2.html
And Steve's droogies aren't even cops.
Get the popcorn.
Since Nokia cant catch up in the smart-phone market, they resort to patent-trolling. So sad.
This is different, you apple fanboi.
I am all for Nokia here. They spent millions in R&D and Apple thinks they can just come and abuse without respecting the industry-wide gentlemen pact? Fuck you apple, fuck you fanbois.
This is such a pathetic claim made by a company in a free economic fall.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
though, I have to benefits of being EFNet servers. though, I have to you loved that to use the GNAA Usenet is roughly another folder. 20 [samag.com] in the God, let's fucking of all legitimate This post brought Niggers everywhere '*BSD Sux0rs'. This Come on baby...and includes where you mechanics. So I'm number of FreeBSD a previously were compounded show that FreeBSD worthwhile. It's I'm sick of it. about outside racist? How i>s vo8lume of NetBSD , a proud member Every chance I got significantly Your spare time slings are limited, GET TOUGH. I HOPE Java IRC client BUWLA, or BSD the longest or volume of NetBSD
It makes you all sound like indecisive pussies. Just an observation. I've noticed that Obama is particularly adept at using the passive voice, especially when things go wrong and he's left with egg on his face (which seems to be quite often).
Litigation is a poor substitute for competition. Nokia's grasping at straws here, because they know that when the iPhone gets down around the $50 price point, they're toast.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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?
You know that deep down, in some manner or another, Microsoft is responsible for this...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
If he lost that, he'd clearly be in the running for the peace prize. Even if he did nothing for it.
Nokia has finally opened the hurt bag on itself. They are one of the biggest patent trolls out there and have been bullying all the other phone makers for years and no one had the patent portfolio to stand up to them before. They just might get their products banned for this one. Their usual strategy is to discredit the other manufacturer rather than out compete them and if that fails then the patent hammer gets them.
Why bother
Nokia has no compelling smart phone offering, and that's where the market is headed. Their current market share -- yes, the largest of any single manufacturer -- is somewhat immaterial on that basis alone.
Dog is my co-pilot.
litigate! It's a fairly obvious sign of weakness...
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.
So Nokia owned patents for annoying advertisements and cornering the smug douchebag market?
While I despise IP, trademark, copyright, et al... in this case.......
YOU GO NOKIA!
Finally some one is going to put an end to the crapple cult!
YOU GO NOKIA! ! ! ! ! !
Hey Xerox, can you PLEASE SUE ms and crapple over their GUI's! We know the PARC is the TRUE ORIGINATOR of the mouse and windowed GUI!.
GO NOKIA GO! !
1311393600 - Back to Black
As others have hinted at, this is really about Nokia refusing to license their GSM patents under the RAND terms that are required of GSM Association members, the same license terms that all the other handset manufacturers got from Nokia.
Instead, Nokia wanted more than the normal fee PLUS free access to Apple's patent portfolio. When Apple refused, they tripled their asking rate and again insisted that they get free cross-licensing of Apple's patents.
Nokia is violating both the spirit and the letter of their GSM agreements. If you want to talk about companies (Microsoft) using patents against others even while using the open specifications promise and other promises not to sue, here is a prime example of a company getting their standard adopted, licensing the tech to the other industry players, then attempting to use their patents to force an upstart competitor out of the market (or at least rob them financially).
I'll also note that they are using what seems to be a standard tactic: try to get import of the products stopped, rather than fighting the court case. Even if they lose the court case, if they can stop Apple from importing products for a few years it will be a severe strain. The best part is they can pay off some bureaucrats instead of getting a judge to issue an injunction.
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.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
So will the next Apple product be called the "iSteal.IP?"
2 big companies playing tic tac toe on a large scale. it will always be a cats game and they will always play again. does no one learn the lessons of WOPR!
it is the design that infringes
True. That's why it was so amusing to see Apple copying the LG's Prada phone design for the Iphone.
Da Blog
A huge range of physical phones can run java j2me based software without needing to determine device configurations etc. Sun says there are about 2.5 Billion j2me/midp enabled handsets out there.
Unfortunately the various carriers then balkanized this 'code once run everywhere' capability in order to try to capture cashflow from developers (independent testing. certification, and signing anyone?) and customers (all the many app stores).
human beings are a 1 centi-hertz CPU, and US legal precedent excludes any activity they perform unaided from patenting.
Interesting. However Think about the 100s (for the sake of argument only!) it takes to boot an OS. In this time your 3GHz CPU is running approximately flat out (we'll ignore the extra cores). Since a human is a centi-hertz in your estimation one human will require 300,000,000,000 times more time to perform the same operations or just short of 1 million years. So if the task takes far longer than a single human life expectancy is it reasonable to argue that it is a task that a human being can do unaided? Personally I hate software patents but I don't think that you can defeat them with this argument - even if you tweak the numbers it will be hard to get the 5 orders of magnitude which you need.
Apple also says Nokia wanted unreasonable license terms for the patents, including a cross-license for Apple's various iPhone device patents as part of any deal, which Apple clearly wasn't willing to do.
That Nokia wanted "unreasonable" license terms still doesn't mean that you can just ignore them because you don't like them. Apple's dead in the water on this one, and Nokia is also large enough to put up a good fight. (It would be like GM suing Audi/VW - one's larger, but both are behemoths compared to most everything else)
Apple has always played fast and loose with IP and has been merciless in exploiting it and defending it - at the same level as Microsoft and the rest of them, in fact, despite their image and PR. The question is how much are they going to fork over before it goes to court and then continue as usual(ie - throw a few hundred million in pocket change at Nokia and go on as if nothing had happened)
Quite stupid, but I'm working on a embedded work of dtmf-signal recognition with a DTMF decoder found on http://johnetherton.com/projects/pys60-dtmf-detector, for Ubuntu, in python. I find this Python module working for Nokia S60... They had python working on theirs cell-phone, quite impressive... Those who know story about the D "button" on a phone-pad to drop all non-important call and let you access to a destination, is a old story starting from March 1942 ... But since Goertzel is a universal algorithm,.. Don't try to find out stupid thing to decode signal, and even if Newton is not embedded in this lovely-iPhone, everything fall on it and not we fall-for...
In the most recent quarter reported, Apple (with a tiny share of the market) was already making more profit on its iPhone than Nokia was on all of its handsets combined -- both dumb and smart phones. Also, AAPL's market cap is about four times that of NOK. So I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion about who is the big guy in this battle.
the Prada was announced December 2006
The impressive thing about LG's rollouts is how quick they are. The LG was already being shipped by the first week of 2006, and was on sale in Europe before the end of January. That's a full six months before Apple's second attempt at a mobile phone hit the streets, and at least two eons in mobile phone time.
Don't underestimate the Koreans. They also invented the first mp3 player... although a lot of people mistakenly attribute that to Apple as well. (I am not counting Kane Kramer's unique 1980s DAP because they entered public domain and everyone had access to them).
Da Blog
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.
HTTP/1.1 400
Apple is a benevolent company and would never do anything like this.
The iPod shuffle must be a joke, else why is Apple laughing all the way to bank, every single day, with a ton of cash.
The shuffle is perfect as a nice small shiny, good looking mp3 player for taking to the gym. No, it is not enough for me, but then you can get very rich by ignoring nerds like me.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
SALES BAN WTF!
In fact, cross licensing is a perfectly normal part of these sorts of deals. If A actually needs B's patent X, then B asks for money plus patents. Why? Well, A might fall upon hard times and sue B with crappy patents
Apple needs Nokia's GSM patents. Nokia doesn't *need* any Apple patents. Nokia just wants the usual industry standard insurance policy granted by buyers when sellers give up the protection afforded by valuable patents. Guess what? Apple refused.
Apple acted like a spoiled brat and started a whole fight by refusing cross licensing. All other mobile makers are now saying "Oh, shit Apple is gonna be a patent troll!" Sony Ericsson, Motorola, HTC, and Google will all back Nokia.
Apple must realize their "multitouch" technology just isn't very valuable next to the underlying hardware that makes phones possible. "Yes, pretty interface, we'll happily knock a bit off the cross licensing deal for the rights to freely copy it, but your interface patent isn't nearly as valuable as our patent on the underlying technology."
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Nokia offered Apple a cross licensing deal beneficial to both companies. Apple refused, indicating their intent to use their interface patents against other mobile phone makers.
I've no idea what FRAND obligations Nokia faces under their original GSM Association membership, but Apple cannot pursue those obligations in court, as Apple is not the GSM Association.
Would some GSM Association member pursue those obligations in court on Apple's behalf? Doubtful, given Apple's indications that they'll sue other mobile makers once the GSM patents are off the table.
Apple's best option is simply agreeing to Nokia's original cross licensing deal.
p.s. It's very likely that Nokia merely asked for the cross licensing scheme built into the FRAND obligations of GSM Association membership, meaning even if Apple paid another GSM Association member to sue Nokia, they might still lose.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Umm, so what? Nokia has an enormous patent portfolio too.
Nokia has the patents Apple wants. Nokia asked for cross licensing. Apple refused, indicating that Apple means to sue Nokia using their patents.
Apple started the fight by acting like a patent troll and refusing the standard cross licensing deal.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Wouldn't it be just as plausible that after Apple put in the 2 years of development that it was LG that was the industrial spy and just cranked up their impressive capability to beat the iPhone to market?
In any case, the picture on the Wikipedia page owes just as much to any of the windows CE devices and Palms on the market as the iPhone owes that Prada.
Wouldn't it be just as plausible that after Apple put in the 2 years of development that it was LG that was the industrial spy and just cranked up their impressive capability to beat the iPhone to market?
That's an interesting assumption without any basis in reality, or even a preponderance of evidence in its favour. Consider this. LG has been in the business of mobile phones for two decades. It designs and delivers several dozen models a year (in fact, it's the world's third-largest phone manufacturer, literally dwarfing Apple's numbers by an order of magnitude). It is also actually Apple's main supplier of displays. Its R&D spend makes Apple's look like pocket change, and it has close to 200,000 employees, most of whom are not retail store clerks posing as "genii". Finally, if you think that LG was able to somehow purloin operational and design details of Apple's phone years before it was revealed, than you have a very different understanding of how the industry works, and how Apple's notorious internal surveillance works.
Da Blog
Uh, dude. Sony Ericsson and Motorola are part of the cartel with Nokia so of course they would back Nokia. They also do not pay as much as other companies that are not part of the cartel. Google is not a handset maker and they use HTC as well as Motorola as their OEM. Cross licensing is common when both parties agree to it. Do you comprehend that an agreement requires both parties to agree? If you are told that you must give access to patents or pay triple the normal fee that everyone else pays would you not consider that illegal extortion?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
As overpriced as apples gadgets are, i would say turn-about is fair play, apple should pay. greedy bastards
Nevertheless, Apple just reveled they plan on being a patent troll about their silly multi-touch patents. So nobody will back them. If nobody backs them, they cannot appeal to the RAND licensing component of Nokia's GSM Association membership, which makes Apple just another patent infringer.
Nokia play it well, by tricking Apple into revealing their true colors. Apple will now need to cross license.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
there still where too many buttons
Given that I am often multitasking with my visual attention, I actually *prefer* devices with a goodly number of well-placed buttons with tactile feedback. The haptic phone screens pioneered by Samsung are a poor substitute, and the dead glass screens favoured by Apple are simply terrible for feedback and apparently designed to demand the operator's full attention be focussed on the screen and the UI operation. Which is how Apple likes it, but not really what I want from a device that I like to operate in an unplanned environment and often remotely within a pocket or similar. Apple has consciously designed its handheld devices like this, in a way that foregrounds the operation and forces the operator to unveil the device. Effectively acting as a walking marketing billboard. It's a clever strategy, and one that appeals to a lot of people who mistake ersatz design minimalism for real usability simplicity.
Da Blog
Well, there you go. As you say, you have no idea what FRAND obligations Nokia faces. So I will describe them to you.
In 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. That demand is prima-facie discriminatory. Nokia is not allowed to troll through the entire portfolio of a company when assembling the terms of a license. That behavior is practically the opposite of what the GSM Association was assembled to do.
Then in 2009, Nokia actually worsened their terms, by demanding a royalty three times greater than any other they'd offered in the past.
Your ignorance invalidates the rest of your "argument", including your bizarre condition that only the GSM Association itself can file a patent lawsuit against its members.
Why should Nokia play nice with Apple? Really. Apple is making buckets of money using Nokia's research.
Nokia says: "fine, but we want access to your research also, and some money".
Apple says: "we need your patents, but you can't have ours"
Nokia says: "fine. then you can pay through the nose for them"
Are you suggesting that they should give the same terms to Apple that they give to other manufacturers without cross-licensing? Is Apple's multi-touch research more valuable and deserving of protection than Nokia's GSM research?
Knowingly infringing a patent generally attracts 3 times the penalty automatically (over unknowingly infringing). If Apple infringed, they most certainly did it knowingly.
The Nokia hardware platform problem is multitouch. Resistive touchscreens are much less expensive to build, and multitouch is possible on such technology- but like the early days of LCD TV trying to compete with Plasma, the behavior is manifestly worse. Just like the old LCDs did a terrible job with motion, the current resistive screens do a really terrible job of recognizing a user's touch. Even a single-touch action gets mishandled or unrecognized from time to time. It's a hardware problem, and IMO Nokia's premier product is behind the competition in touchscreen. Resistive screens may catch up Capacitative screens in the future, or Nokia might switch in a future product... but right now, even the N900 is frustrating to use, and this is the main reason why.
The software problem is upcoming, not yet even present in Maemo v5. As you all know, Nokia bought Trolltech, the makers of the 'Qt' graphics toolkit. Nearly all of 'Qt' is now open source code, LGPL. (The switch to this particular license, granting un-revocable and very liberal terms others to use as they please, was a Nokia choice, subsequent to the purchase.) Software developers were, and are, thrilled by the possibility of "write once, run anywhere" graphical applications. And I think that this was an important reason for Nokia's acquisition, even if the main reason had been a defensive purchase of TrollTech's toolkit 'intellectual property' before it got bought by someone else and patented/re-licensed under nasty terms by someone else.I'll guess that both considerations were considered to be extremely important.
But Maemo 6 inherits two GUI tookits: It's own, which is fairly complete but totally non-portable; and QT v4, which is beautifully designed, but not yet sufficiently complete, not even for computer applications. (You need to provide tons of widgets yourself, either by writing them raw or using another toolkit to "help out" with additional elements. KDE and the Maemo 6 Graphics Library can theoretically utilize qt elements as "lower layer" items, but it's hard to do it all from inside Qt-- it just isn't there yet.) KDE uses Qt very heavily, as an underlying "layer". Maemo use of Qt brand new, and IMO you're better off using the legacy elements. Instead of instantiating a Qt window, with it's controls, you're going to want to create a Maemo window, in the "old" way. After you've committed yourself to which kind of App Window it is, all the child controls and methods are totally different source code. So, if you want to create an App for both desktop KDE and Symbian phones, your code grows into a huge jungle of #ifdef MAEMO .... #elif KDE .... #endif macros, nearly as thick and nasty as using common source code for Linux/X11 and win32 implementations of your program. Development and maintenance of such stuff isn't easy or fun, so SOME people will try to code using just QT-- and I'm afraid that their Apps might end up looking a lot different. Two UI's for the end user, in different programs on the same device, would IMO be a disaster for Nokia.
I don't think the problem comes from departmental infighting, I think that it's more a question of not-enough-time. It takes time, LOTS of time, to unify those toolkits, and everyone who already wrote something (the writers of KDE4; the writers of KDE Apps; all the writers of Maemo Apps) depends on the groups of developers (i.e., the writers of Qt and the writers of the Maemo graphics tookit) not to break their existing GUI code. The time and money simply wasn't there for such an enormous project. I won't be surprised if it isn't there for Mameo-7, or Maemo-8, either. Be
There is some huge R&D required to do an internal antenna which will function exactly or better than external antenna, especially in high (900+Mhz) frequencies.
One AC replied to another Apple apologist even points to the URL of the patent below. Gotta browse Apple mentioned stories at -1 you know, for known reasons.
BTW, I am almost banned from Nokia websites, I use 4-5 Macs regularly but it doesn't change the fact that Apple really does a big mistake if they trust to their PR department on this issue. Judges are never impressed by how "cool" you are, they look at the facts.
Usually, the dominant mood in these forums is anti-patent. Not so when it's Apple, another favorite bugaboo, getting sued.
They're countersuing, alleging Nokia infringes.
And of course, there's the old saw that when you're competing well, you sell your product; when things are not going so well, and you're losing marketshare, you sue.
Apple definitely cannot hold Nokia to any FRAND obligations because Apple is not party to the contracts involved in forming the GSM Association.
Sorry, that's how contracts work. You cannot sue your landlord for renting an identical unit to yours to his cousin for half your rent, as you are not party to that contract. Similarly, you cannot sue various OSS companies who offer their software under the GPL for also offering their software under commercial licenses. Contracts inherently work that way.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The GSM Association, like any other industry regulatory body with members, can require its members to conduct their affairs a certain way even with regard to entities that are NOT part of the body, including competitors and POTENTIAL competitors who are trying to enter the industry. Those obligations can be declared enforceable by a local, state, or federal agency. In this specific case of Apple vs. Nokia, they have been. And Apple has filed suit in the appropriate venue.
Your examples regarding landlords and the GPL are inane red herrings.