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Nokia Claims Apple Does "Legal Alchemy" To Mask IP Theft
CWmike writes "Nokia asked a federal judge last week to toss out Apple's antitrust claims, saying the iPhone maker indulged in 'legal alchemy' when it tried to divert attention from its infringement of Nokia's intellectual property. The filing was the latest salvo in a battle that began in October 2009 when handset maker Nokia sued Apple, saying the iPhone infringed on 10 of its patents, and that Apple was trying 'to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation.' Apple countered in December with a lawsuit of its own that not only claimed Nokia infringed 13 of its patents, but that Nokia also violated antitrust law by legally attacking Apple after it declined to pay what it called 'exorbitant royalties' and refused to give Nokia access to iPhone patents. 'These non-patent counterclaims are designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia's intellectual property, a practice Apple evidently believes should only be of paramount concern when it is the alleged victim,' Nokia charged in the motion. Apple is on a legal roll, having also recently sued the maker of Google's Nexus One, HTC, for patent infringement."
Sure, for those specific innovations. But R&D is an expensive, time consuming process that leads to many dead ends and few profitable results (if done in the Bell Atlantic method). So they do need to capitalize on the relatively few innovations that are profitable to pave the way for the vast number that are directly profitable (Consider that Bell invented basically DLP way back in the 1970's. Sure, it's a good innovation, but it never paid them profits, because it didn't become economically feasible for decades later).
I think personally software patents are stupid, because the barrier to entry into such a field are so small that it's very hard to realistically say "I'm the first one to ever come up with this idea" and prove it (After all, it could have been part of some student's senior research project in the 70's, but was never "published")... With technologies with a large barrier to entry (especially large barriers to research), patents offer some protection to companies that they can recoup their research costs. Consider the example of someone building computer algorithms for file system interaction. How many man-hours does it take to do that? Sure, there could be a fair number, but probably not man-decades... How many non-human resources are involved? Sure, you do have a few computers/servers/etc, but my guess is MAYBE $10k... Now, consider research into radio protocols for cellphone data. How many man-hours are involved there? Potentially many decades (if you have more 2 or 3 working for any significant amount of time). How many non-human resources? LOTS. FCC licenses, transmitting equipment, diagnostic equipment, potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions of dollars). All dedicated (for that particular time at least) to the research. That's why patents exist... To give companies an incentive to do non-trivial innovation... The fact of the mater is (IMHO) for a large number of the software patents that I've seen, the innovation is trivial at best (If not already common knowledge)...
Just my $0.02...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
This is a myth.
Only specific patents. Those patents were offered at the same cost as everyone else. However Apple feels entitled to Nokia's entire patent catalouge which is not covered by agreements like RAND and have openly admitted to using these patents without paying fees.
Other manufacturers pay less because they have their own patent portfolio's which are of equal value, these are traded to Nokia for use of their patent portfolio in lieu of cash, Apple has no such patent portfolio so they have to pay cash like manufacturers that do not maintain heavy patent portfolio's like HTC.
Whoops, I said HTC. Apple is now using it's dubious software patents to sue HTC. This is being done entirely as a response to Nokia suing Apple over patents not covered by RAND in an attempt to artificially increase the value of it's own patent portfolio, which is far weaker then Nokia's.
And that is exactly what Nokia is suing for. Nokia spend years and millions developing this technology, Apple has no technology of equal value so why should Apple get a free ride.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.